things that money buys

1. confidence

2. an audience to listen to you talk authoritatively and passionately and at length about things you don't really know about...

On Dating

This is from a Washington Post series last month: "OnDating: Does Being Smart Make is Harder to Date?"

I laughed sarcastically when I read the title, thinking, gosh how vain it would be to think that but then I read on:

By Ellen McCarthy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 3, 2009

Alex Benzer, a Harvard grad and author of "The Tao of Dating" books, created a stir last month by declaring that the smart people of the world have the toughest time dating.

His reasons make sense: In adolescence, intelligent folks spent more time trying to tick off college application-worth achievements than developing real relationships; they feel entitled to an easy dating life because of all they've achieved; for years they've valued smarts over sexuality; they discount potential candidates for not being up to their brainiac standards; and most damning of all, they over-think everything.


Yikes!

ask jeeves

1) how do you transform a struggling community into a thriving community?

2) how do you encourage adults to take care of their families when they are struggling to take care of themselves?

3) what the heck am i doing?

somebody come make a blockbuster about my slum

There's something memorializing a place or a culture in the movies that makes it glamorous. That's why it's so exciting to see your own city on the big screen- "Hey I've been there!" More than that, it's moving to see your own culture or lifestyle, or pieces of it displayed on screen. To have details of your life, familiar smells and sounds or tastes, dangers, comforts, thrills and excitement that you recognize from your experience up there... there's something stirring about it.

Even if the movie itself is supposed to be gritty and not glam, movies aggrandize every day life. It makes these details legandary, something that other people outside of you can picture and even want to be a part of. Picturing the common/everyday beauty and ache of a place that often both makes it universal. And also, like, magical in some way? Seeing it, you feel nostalgia and also that you are a part of something bigger than yourself. you feel this sense of pride even in whatever brokenness that's depicted because it's YOURS!

movies describe and universalize the beauty of your place and when someone from the outside walks in they can immediately recognize it and feel kind of excited-- i felt like this all the time as I drove freeways in LA, remembering and knowing how often this experience was memorialized in the movies, the tall palm trees lining the median, speeding , enjoying the breeze cause the day was crystal clear. I pictured myself in a movie.

Similarly, in Pennsylvania, driving our pick-up through hills lined with dairy farms and cornfields, I pictured myself in a county song and I started to love country music.

So i think this kind of thing works not just with movies but songs, poetry, books, anything!

I've thought so many times here in the slums in bangkok how I wish I could see a coming-of-age stories set here in the slums. To see a pride develop in coming from here and all that that entails. Because there is a unique beauty, thrill, etc to this place and I want to see it celebrated.

A poem about a slow realization on the boat this morning

Who would have ever thought
that dog poop smell
was me?

A poem about God

When all I see is doom and gloom

You don't.

itchy!

i was bitten by a jellyfish larvae last week at the ocean. The first day it hurt and then it grew into an itchy rash. Of course, mosquito/ant bites are always with me. And in this heat i've been breaking out in heat rash everywhere, hands, stomach.. and in a small splotchy lip-shaped spot on my neck.
My neighbor- "Who bit you?"
Me- "Uh, it's a weather allergy."
My neighbor, smiling sideways all sly- "Ooookaaay..."