I have all these unfinished drafts and haven’t been able to write for months.  Not sure what’s going on with me.  Not that I haven’t been feeling inspired but I just haven’t been setting aside time to write.  The most random thing happened the other day.  The photo you see above made it onto Reddit and The Daily What (thanks PatSun for bringing it to my attention).  I took it in a hotel in Amsterdam (Chic & Basic) and totally forgot about it but someone found it and posted it up.  The Reddit comments are so crazy and angry.  The public really worries me sometimes.  I try not to do this but sometimes I’ll read through the NPR fanpage comments on Facebook (I know, not the best reading material but I get bored on the bus sometimes!) and it’s really depressing sometimes.  Speaking of which, every time something political happens (like oh, I don’t know, the passing of the healthcare reform bill) I’m reminded of how my Facebook friends would never be able to attend a party together.  Based on their status updates and comments, I think people would be at each other’s throats.  I guess that’s what happens when you are a Christian that grows up in Houston and then becomes a social worker and moves to San Francisco.

Anyway, the husband and I have abandoned reading The Known World and have picked up Andre Agassi’s autobiography, Open.  It’s been a really great read so far, one of those books that are hard to put down.  (Gotta love those denim Nike shorts!)  I wish I had spent more of my youth watching tennis, I’ve really only started watching tennis these past 5 years and feel as though I’ve missed out on so many great moments.  I need to buy a DVD of the classic games or something.

The release of the iPad has provoked a lot of technology debates between the husband and I.  Heated debates about inventory marketing strategies, why Apple didn’t include cut/paste in their early feature sets, why Apple didn’t include a camera in the iPad, Apple’s courtship of the masses at the cost of alienation (and partial betrayal) of their core fanbase, the sustainability of cloud computing software companies who neglect to invest in the hardware side of things, and more.  Sometime we’ll be at a restaurant (usually a hole in the wall) and we’ll get so fired up and animated that I’m pretty sure most of the people in the restaurant think we’re fighting and probably breaking up.  Our latest episode was at Chava’s in the Mission (great place for soups, I love the Pozole there and the husband loved the Menudo and they have awesome handmade tortillas) where 5 or 6 waitresses came over to check on us with worried smiles, asking if everything was okay.  I love that about us though, always challenging each other, often disagreeing but even when we agree, it’s fun to articulate all of our arguments and points together and cheer each other on — even though there isn’t anyone right there with us disagreeing.  Sometimes we’ll even try to construct opposing arguments that other may try to use and then work together to deconstruct them.  Maybe if one day my brain feels extra juicy this month, I’ll blog about these topics.

Life just feels good these days.  Maybe a little too comfortable, but good.  We are still looking into different community based organizations to get involved with.  There are quite a few in the East Bay but a lot of the ones we are interested in are focused in East Oakland and we are hoping to get involved with something closer to home.

A couple months ago we were attending an evening church service and this woman was playing the most sorrowful, haunting song on the piano during the communion and it made me want to play the piano again.  I don’t think my parents read these posts but I know they would laugh if they heard me say that.  One of my most impressive feats as a 5th grader was to convince my parents that I really shouldn’t waste any more of their time and money on piano lessons especially since my older sister, Anny, had already mastered it.  They amazingly let me quit and then let me join a girls’ basketball league.  It was one of the best experiences of my life.  About the piano, I don’t really have the time for it right now and I have no idea where I’d put a piano so I’ll just file that away in the back of my mind and revisit it again when we’re more settled in life.

I don’t think I’ve ever reopened a draft of a post, finished it, and then published it.  Usually posts that stay in the draft folder just become mentions in a paragraph in a random post like this.

Well, Peru was just absolutely incredible.  I’ll make a mega post later when all of my best photos are uploaded and spare you the play by play.

It’s summer!  What are my plans?

I turned in my TCH badge today but I still have a bit of work to do on the LEAH website.  Hopefully I can wrap that up by the middle of June.

Here’s a rough to-do list for the next few months:

Try to hook up with the Boys and Girls Club

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Landscape the backyard to look like one of these yards

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Successfully complete some inductive bible studies (starting with Kay Arthur’s book, Lord, Only You Can Change Me)

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Improve my photography skillz (via Tom Ang’s Digital Photography Masterclass)

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Improve my tennis skillz (try to reach a 4.0 rating)

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Read the Harry Potter Series

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I think I’m most excited about improving my photography skills.  Peru is such a beautiful country that really almost any photo you take is going to be a good one but I spent a lot of the trip frustrated with settings and not being able to get my photos to look the way I wanted them to.  I think photography is one of those fads that a lot of people can latch on to and most people plateau and are okay with it but only some people really disciplined in learning and pushing themselves to the next level.  It reminds me a lot of acoustic guitar in high school where everybody and their mama learned to play the C, G, D, E, A, B, F, Em, Am, and F#m chords, learned how to do a double strum, and then just quit learning.  I really want to push myself.  The book seems pretty interesting, it’s presented in the format of a class so there are assignments.  Maybe I’ll post my homework assignments here to log my progress.

It’s going to be a summer of transitions and changes, goodbyes and hellos, sunshine and mosquitoes, and learning and growing.  I’m really looking forward to it.

Oh yeah, and if you haven’t seen Pixar’s UP yet, go see it!  I think it’s the 4th best Pixar movie.  (1st Place is a tie: Toy Story & The Incredibles, 2nd Place: Monster’s Inc.)  Such a sweet movie to start the summer with — (oh and the 3D is not that great so it’s not a must).

I’m a little late on my new year’s post.

This is going to be a year of big changes. I’m finishing grad school, for one. I must say it will be nice to be DINKs (Double Income, No Kids) again.  It will also be nice to have all of our weekends and nights back with no papers, reading or projects hanging over my head.  Starting a new career is an exciting but daunting endeavor. These next few months I’ll really need to do some soul searching (and some serious job hunting!)

We’re also going to do some decision making about where we want to live for the next few years. Not that anything is necessarily permanent but I’ve just been in Texas for so long — thinking about moving is a bit unreal at this point.

I was at the husband’s office last week and picked up his copy of Bill Clinton’s autobiography, My Life.  And it’s been a pretty good read so far — despite the fact that it sounds a lot like a campaign speech at times.

Here’s the first paragraph of the prologue:

“When I was a young man just out of law school and eager to get on with my life, on a whim I briefly put aside my reading preference for fiction and history and bought one of those how-to books: How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life, by Alan Lakein. The book’s main point was the necessity of listing short-, medium-, and long-term life goals, then categorizing them in order of their importance, with the A group being the most important, the B group next, and the C the last, then listing under each goal specific activities designed to achieve them.  I still have that paperback book, now almost thirty years old.  And I’m sure I have that old list somewhere buried in my papers, although I can’t find it.  However, I do remember the A list.  I wanted to be a good man, have a good marriage and children, have good friends, make a successful political life, and write a great book.”

I’ve been thinking about my own A, B, and C lists a lot these past few days.  What things I’d like to add and what things I’d like to categorize differently.  Thinking about these things has been a really great way to start my year of new changes.

Last year we were so jet lagged from our trip to Belgium, Amsterdam and France that we pretty much slept through the countdown.  This year we went to the New Year’s Eve party at the House of Blues.  What better way to start the new year than with some good friends?

It rained a lot last night. It was kind of a weird rain though. There were times where I felt like I was on the set of The Truman Show and someone was flicking the rain switch on and off.

The husband is out of town this week which means I’m left to fend for myself.  Fend against my own paranoia, my own laziness, and my own bad habits.

I’m a little paranoid about writing that he’s out of town because I worry that someone will read it and decide now is a good time to rob us.  Yeah, I know.

Usually I get pretty lazy about school work.  And usually, it’s the husband that’s getting on my case to hurry up and finish during the week so we won’t be stuck at home all weekend.  I finished writing a paper last night but I didn’t get around to putting together my powerpoint presentation on pathological gambling.  I’m almost done reading the memoirs of a pathological gambler (that has been pretty fascinating) called Born to Lose by Bill Lee.  I can’t wait until I can start devouring my to-read-for-fun list.  It’s runs 14 books deep, not counting that whole magical wizard kids series.

Luckily, we haven’t had to turn on the A/C in about two weeks (I love double paned glass & insulation!) so I haven’t had the opportunity to forget to turn off the A/C.

The strange phenomenon that always happens is that I see myself becoming ultra-responsible in his absence.  I wake up earlier in the mornings for fear of oversleeping, I clean the house more often, and I eat healthier.

Unfortunately I have a big stack of school work waiting for me so I can’t indulge in me-time with good books, shopping, web surfing (I’m way behind on TED talks!) and television.  So my nights are quiet, in front of my laptop, at the dining room table, with one of my cats sleeping on my lap.

I’m actually an introverted person, I’ve always loved spending time alone, I think the husband has just become an extension of self (or the other way around?) and it’s a weird feeling to miss yourself.

I really like Twitter.  Thanks to everyone who has kept me entertained on there.  Special shoutout to RawkHawk who reviews music albums.  A recent fave tweet: “Snow Patrol – A Hundred Million Suns: Sounds like a mega-church’s dream worship band creating mostly secular ballads in moody chords.”

Haha, I knew that album sounded familiar.

Good thing the husband’s coming home soon.  If he weren’t, I’d probably start undertaking projects like the two below:

Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes — Mark J. Penn with E. Kinney Zalesne

You probably saw this book in my sidebar about a month ago.  It’s an interesting little read with a very useful table of contents that lets you jump around to the topics you’re interested in and skip the ones you don’t care for.  The book was published in 2007 so the information is relatively recent.  Here are some of the more interesting tidbits (I’ll skip the references for easier reading):

• 3 million American adults have turned online dates into a long-term relationship or marriage — that’s the same number of couples in America who say they met in church.
• On average, Americans work over 1,800 hours per year, substantially more than most workers around the world.  Although we get fewer vacation days per year than other Western countries, we let more than twice as many go unused.
• Since 1970, the number of women lawyers in America has grown 2,900%.
• Today in America, there are three times as many professional tanning parlors as there are Starbucks.
• 7 out of the 10 night-owl nations (large percentage of people go to sleep after midnight) are Asian.
• Noise reaches the potential for permanent damage at about 85 decibels. Hair dryers come in at 90. Noise on a subway platform is 105. In an airplane cabin, it’s 110. At a rock concert, it’s 120. Apparently nine seconds into a rock concert, you experience hearing loss.
• 63% of American households have pets.
• The percentage of split-ticket voters has gone up 42% since 1952.
• Between 1972 and 2004, the combined prison and jail population in the U.S. went from 330,000 to over 2 million.
• About 1.5 million children in the U.S. between the ages of 8 and 18 are vegetarians.
• The society with the largest proportion of centenarians in the world is the Japanese island of Okinawa.
• The typical vacation-home buyer earns just $71,000. The median income of investment-home-buyers is $85,700. The median purchase price of second homes is under $200,000. Second homes are a middle-class craze.
• More than 1 in 3 Americans aged 25-29 have a tattoo.
• The U.S. adult population as a whole is about 49% extroverted.  Surprisingly, nearly 60% of the most enthusiastic tech users are extroverted.
• About 40 million adults in the U.S. regularly visit Internet pornography sites.  That’s more than ten times the number of people who regularly watch baseball.
• The average video/computer game player is 33 years old.
• The average age at which Americans lose their virginity is 16.9.
• In Italy, a whopping 82 percent of men aged 18-30 are still living at home with their parents.

“Drug addicts do not come to their addiction from a social or environmental vacuum. This Court should not close its eyes to the multifarious circumstances of disadvantage and deprivation that frequently precede and precipitate a descent into illegal drug use.”

“Nor can I accept that the exercise of free choice in the use of drugs is always of equal dimensions. It is not every decision to use drugs that can properly or fairly be characterized as a decision made in the exercise of free choice. The will of an individual can be overborne, or undermined, not only by acts of another person, but also the pressure of circumstances. I do not accept that most drug offenders are truly exercising free will when they choose the degradation, despair, criminality and cycle of imprisonment that can follow the initial use of illegal drugs. The circumstances that propel the offender to use drugs are often, if not usually, beyond his or her control. They may or may not be combined with a vulnerable personality or even a weakness of character. Many drug offenders have not had the life experiences or the normal developmental path that permit a conclusion that the decision to take drugs was a decision made in the exercise of a free choice in the sense in which that phrase is ordinarily understood.”

Not that bad choices are excusable, or that all bad choices are a result of bad environments and circumstances.  But I just think that free choice isn’t always as readily available as we, who live a privileged life, imagine.

I definitely think there is a balance.  I think people should be more empathetic about circumstances, but at the same time, drug offenders need to take responsibility to repair the damage that has been done in their lives.  It’s a delicate balance in social work– advocating for those who need it, while empowering people to advocate for themselves and take responsibility for their actions.  For some strange reason, I think we crave a black and white conclusion on people’s poor life outcomes, we want to be able to say, “it’s their fault” or “it’s not their fault”. I think we need to move away from that in order to improve society.

“There’s a paradox there, of course, since what can things be but themselves? In Augustine’s view, we live in what he calls the region of unlikeness, and what we’re unlike is God. We are apart from God, who is pure being, who is himself, who is outside of time. And time is our tragedy, the substance we have to wade through as we try to move closer to God. Rivers flowing to the sea, a flame reaching upward, a bird homing: these movements all represent objects yearning to be their true selves, to achieve their true state. For humans, the motion reflects the yearning for God, and everything we do through time comes from moving–or at least trying to move– toward God. So that we can be our true selves. So there’s a paradox there again, that we must submit to God–which feels deceptively like not being ourselves–in order to become ourselves. We might call this yearning love, and it’s just that we often mistake what we love. We think we love sensuality. Or admiration. Or, say, another person. But loving another person is just a confusion, an error. Even if it is the kind of error that a nice, reasonable person might make–”

– excerpt from short story, “The Region of Unlikeness” by Rivka Galchen, The New Yorker

The fiction selection in The New Yorker magazine is real hit or miss for me. But when it hits, it really hits.

One visit to Domy Books and it’s gotten on my list of cool places to go in Houston.

It’s officially a bookstore but there are enough toys on their shelves to be a bonafide toystore. So much so that the Houston Press awarded it “Best Toy Store” in Houston this year.

It’s a quirky place. There are a lot of comic books and art books but there are regular novels and non-fiction as well.

The toys are the interesting collectible blind box, plastic, and vinyl figurines such as robots, animals dressed up as other animals, humans dressed up as animals, aliens, and other random things. Lots of KidRobot stuff. Here’s an example:

Meet Bones Labbit.

There was this one smoking panda that had the message “Liberado Hoy Por Cerveza Manana” on his T-Shirt. I only took three years of unfocused Spanish in high school but I believe that means “Liberated Today for Beer Tomorrow.”

What a bunch of jokers.

I know what you’re thinking. Bookstore with modern decor, weird Japanese toys and cashier with tattoos and trendy hair behind the counter. Overdone. Trying too hard. You woud think that’s the case but it’s not. There’s no DJ spinning music in the background. As you walk around the bookstore, you really start to believe that whoever designed the store and runs the store loves everything that’s in the store and isn’t trying to fit some sort of business model.

Here’s how they describe themselves:

“Domy is a progressive bookstore with a focus on editioned books, periodicals, video, and product lines that concentrate on national and international contemporary art and culture.

Additionally, Domy will produce exhibitions and events that highlight the store’s intersecting ideas thru a variety of media, including: works on paper, video, music, design and printed matter.”

I’ll definitely be back. I want to buy Craig Thompson’s comic book novel, Blankets, and I want to check out their patio cafe in the back. I think I spotted a waiter carrying waffles with strawberry topping.

A good memoir I recently read was A Long Way Gone.  It’s the personal account of life as a boy soldier (author, Ishmael Beah pictured above) during the conflict in Sierra Leone.  There are plenty of gruesome depictions of war but you never get the feeling that the book is going for shock factor.  I honestly think that the author is just trying to give us a glimpse of the hell he experienced.  The book is also about redemption and trying to slowly regain his humanity.

What chills me about learning about this conflict, or the conflict in Rwanda, or the ongoing genocide in Darfur is that it’s happening in our lifetime.  This isn’t hundreds of years ago when the world wasn’t globally connected.  In my experience, the concept of war in America is mostly a historical one.  And while we currently have troops in Iraq, those without friends or family in Iraq may be hard pressed to find a personal tie to the tragic violence there.  Not that there isn’t sympathy and compassion.  But there’s a frightening lack of empathy or concern.  What’s wrong with us?  Don’t we see that what’s happening in the most remote village in Africa has everything to do with us?

Yeah, of course it’s sad and it’s terrible, but if I’m honest, most of the time it feels like it has little to do with me.  I’m trying hard to fight that.  I’m trying to read books and keep up to date on news.  But it’s really so easy to close the book, turn off the news, and click on a different website.

So what do we do?  I’m still trying to figure this one out.

I just finished a memoir called What Remains last night. The backdrop of the story is the plane crash that killed John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife. The author is Carole Radziwill, the wife of JFK Jr.’s cousin, Anthony Radziwill (who is actually a Polish prince). The four of them are the best of friends and then the plane crash happens, and only a few weeks later, Anthony dies of cancer. Losing two of your best friends at once and then your husband so quickly after– [shudder] I can’t imagine.

This book is absolutely heart wrenching. I don’t know why I do this to myself. I don’t know why I depress myself like this.

Anyway, peripherally, it’s a neat peek into the life of the rich and famous (without overdoing it) and it’s lovely to see how ordinary famous people can be.

The book handles death, friendship and the intimacy of a marriage in a very tangible way and I’d recommend it if you can stomach the inevitable ending.