Archive | |Thinks I Think| RSS feed for this section

#ObservationOfTheDay

26 Sep

Recently I have been bad at the internet.  I have been really bad at email* but even more than that, I have been exceptionally bad at my blog.  I think maybe I have been having sort of a self-sabotage moment, something to which I am no stranger.  I had my best blog day ever last month which led to my best blog month ever, hits-wise anyway.  I was really excited! I was like, yea, things are maybe happening.  Maybe if I write a few more relevant blog posts some of those readers that read my one socially relevant post will visit back for another fix and be like, hey, this girl is funny.  Or smart.  Or annoying but I can’t seem to stop reading.  But then I pretty much didn’t write anything at all!  I totally missed the train.  Like, I saw the train coming, I heard it’s train whistle thing, it started to slow down and just at that moment I dropped a dollar on the ground and instead of being like, “whatever, fuck the dollar” I looked everywhere for it because I really needed that dollar and then the train sped off and who knows when the next one will arrive.  Or, wait!  This is a better comparison and maybe more realistic.  It’s sort of like when I train for a half marathon (or a marathon but, really, that hasn’t happened since like 2007).  So I train hard for the half marathon – but not as hard as I could because I am sort of runner-lazy and also unmotivated – and then the race comes and I do a good job!  And I am having so much fun!  And I am like, “yea, this is great, and if I train even harder I can really kill this distance.”  So for half of the race I am running I am day-dreaming about how much I want to run the next race even better.  And then the race ends and I go about my day.  And then the next day I decide to give myself the day off because my legs are sore.  And then the next day it’s the same thing.  And all of a sudden it’s 3 weeks later, I’ve run like 5 times and now I have to try and get back into shape again.  It’s like, there this is crescendo of excitement when you work towards something and then the music just dissipates and rather than building immediately to the next crescendo, because the musicians are all there in their chairs already so you might as well take advantage of them and besides, they’ve already been paid for the next two hours, you say “fuck it! Consider the extra money an early Christmas/Channuka/non-denominational holiday present!” It’s just stupid.  I mean, I’m sure the musicians appreciate it but that doesn’t even matter because I just made the musicians up.  In the real-life version of this story I am not actually helping anyone, only hurting myself so the story is a little more sad.

Anyway, moving on.  So despite the fact that I haven’t really been writing on my blog, I have been thinking about it.  I have come up with all sorts of fun things to write about.  Things that I think you might enjoy reading.  But I have also come up with this new thing that I am doing on Twitter which is what I was planning on writing about today when I sat down at the computer and before I got distracted talking about trains, running, and musicians.  This thing is called “#ObservationOfTheDay.”  Basically what I do is quite obvious.  Every day I make some sort of observation and then label it with my very own hashtag!  Pretty neat, right?  So on the first day of observing, I tweeted, “Twitter brings me more stress than joy and yet I know I will continue to use it.”  Why would I do this?  Well, I will tell you.

So when I had that one really big post where I got all the hits (most of them from Belgium) it was because of Twitter.  It was because I hashtagged something appropriately and somehow it found itself in the Twitter feed of a Flemmish-language web based newspaper and voila!  The entire population of northern Belgium (minor exaggeration here) was reading my blog!  I thought to myself “wow, this Twitter thing really does work!”  But then I realized that Twitter stresses me the hell out for some of the same reasons, in fact, that I am stressed out by email and regular mail.  It’s like, no matter what you do things are always being hurled at you.  Sort of like when we used to play dodgeball in gym class.  I hated dodegball.  Why would anyone want to go stand on a basketball court and have those big rubber balls thrown them?  It makes zero sense to me.  Anyway, I am constantly getting emails (major exaggeration here) and lots of credit card come-ons and clothing catalogues in the regular mail.  And people are always tweeting.  And when they tweet, they link to articles that look interesting so then after like 10 minutes on Twitter I have like, 25 tabs open with articles I want to read.  I always want to read all of the things.  It’s very stressful.  As a result, I don’t go on Twitter all that often which means that my presence on Twitter, as a tweeter, goes largely unnoticed.  That is a problem because, as I mentioned earlier, Twitter is useful for my blog but only if I have followers or I write about something culturally relevant.  I basically have no followers and I often write about nothing of consequence (this blog post being a perfect example of that) and so therefore my blog just sort of disappears into the world of interwebbery without making too much of a splash.  And so, in an effort to try and fix that, I have decided that I will tweet at least once every day.  (Hooray for structure!)  And thus was born #ObservationOfTheDay.

So yesterday my observation was,

“Dudes look silly in skinny jeans. Therefore, they (the jeans, not the dudes) should be thrown in a pit and burned.”

And then something great happened!  On only my second day of observing, I got a response!  (Granted, it was from one of my few followers who also happens to be a friend of mine from high school with whom I occasionally have amusing twitter-sations, but still!) He responded with the following hilarious bit of information:

“I know a guy who had a serious finger tendon injury from trying to remove his own skinny jeans.”

So I know that finger tendon injuries are no laughing matter (my brother had one from playing dodgeball – see what I did there? Full circle, bitches – and he had to wear a homemade finger-splint for months!), but seriously?  That is hilarious.  And I mean, I don’t want to say that he deserved the finger tendon injury but like, if you injure your finger taking off your skinny jeans then I am left to wonder how in the world you got them on in the first place.  And also, what technique this individual uses to remove said skinny jeans.  As a result of finding out this information, I became immediately happy that I had started my daily observations and had observed this one specific thing, but also sad that I have gotten this far in my life without knowing that someone experienced a serious finger tendon injury from removing his pants.  Better late than never, I suppose.

Anyway, observing is fun!  You should try it!  Also, you can read my daily observations @franklyrebekah.  Today my observation involves rice pudding.

*This is nothing new.  I am often bad at email.

Tags: , , , , , ,

I Dread This Day

11 Sep

Every year I dread the coming of September.  Part of that is due to the fact that I am a summer baby.  I was born in mid-July in the middle of a heat wave.  I imagine my mother cursed me throughout the final month of my fetal development.  To me, although September means better running weather, the turning of the leaves, the overabundance of apples screaming to be turned into apple sauce and pies, it also means the inevitability of winter.  Winter means layers, jackets, goose bumps, frozen fingers and toes, shorter days, frigid puddles topped with ice, snow stained with dog piss.  Winter is not my season.  Never has been, never will be.  But September also means another thing:  another year has passed since September 11th, 2001.

I dread the anniversary of the fall of the World Trade Center.  My mind always, without fail, calls up that photograph from the front page of The New York Times of the man plunging to his death, floors and floors of windows providing the chilling backdrop.  I think I will take that image with me to my death.  I recall the way I found out. My professor, in a voice cracking with emotion, told all of us from the New York City area to quickly call our families, to not be alarmed if calls didn’t go through, that the system was probably overloaded or failing.  All of a sudden I thought of my dad and grandpa who worked in the city.  Of my brother who had planned to fly out to Europe that very morning.  Of all my friends who had just moved to New York to go to college.  I remember sitting in the stairwell, in tears, on the phone with my mother saying to her that we must have done something wrong, that we must have created a world so horrible for some people that the only way they could communicate their anger and suffering was to kill thousands upon thousands of innocent people.  I believed then as I believe now that in order to understand horror, in order to understand the unthinkable, we must look inwards.  Perhaps not as individuals, but as a nation.  We live in an interconnected world and although I would never borrow the language of victim-blamers everywhere by saying that we deserved what we got, because I do not believe that in even the tiniest of ways, I would say that what happened to us did not occur in a vacuum.  It was not random.  It was, at least in part, a reaction to decades of poor foreign policy and problematic international relations.  It was a clash of ideologies, of lifestyles.  It was so many things.

And through all of this the overwhelming emotion that I feel is not anger, it is sadness.  I can apply all of my pragmatism, my knowledge, my now years of hindsight but all of that is just a way to deal with the sadness I feel.  I feel sadness that, as my mom said to me the other night, that was my JFK moment.  It was the moment I will always remember.  It was the moment when the world became a little scarier, a little less fair, a little less predictable, a little more unthinkable.  It was the moment when everything I had read about the reality of the world as a whole was dropped on my doorstep.  It was the first moment in my life that I felt afraid.  I felt afraid and I felt a heaviness and a sadness in every single inch of my being.  Every cell, every drop of blood, every tendon.  I felt sad when I boarded a bus home from college a few days later and could still see the smoke billowing from the wreckage. I felt sad when I passed the town train station and saw the cars whose drivers never returned home from work to pick them up.  I felt sad when I saw the reaction of the American public change from unity to one of hatred, anger, fear, racism.  I felt defeated when my friend, who is of Iranian decent, reported to me that she was spit on outside of one of her classes.

And I hate what came next.  What this attack allowed us to justify.  What it has done to the international community.  I cringe at the knowledge that we feel the right to inflict our collective need for revenge on innocent families.  That we are putting countless people through the pain that we went through.  It makes me crazy that this led to companies like Blackwater, to the increased power given military contractors, to the amount of money spent on violence while people at home suffer.  It infuriates me that people will “Support Our Troops” while simultaneously voting for smaller government, for less money going to the support those men and women really need when they come home.  I shudder to think of the fucked up idea of patriotism that has been born from this tragedy and the many that have followed since.

All of the specifics that I just mentioned are actually not important.  You can agree with them or not agree with them.  They are my own very personal and unique way of making sense of it all.  But I guess the point that I am trying to make is that my feelings about September 11th are very complex.  I think we all have complex feelings.  I can feel sad about all the people that were lost while also feeling angry about what our reaction to the attack has wrought.  I do not have to feel one or the other.  This is not a game show where I only get to choose that which is hiding between door number one or door number two.  I feel everything.  But the thing is that, for me, September 11th is the only day that I allow myself to feel the sadness separately from all of the other conflicting emotions.  It is the day that I remember those horrible videos that replayed over and over and over again.  It is the day that I wake up and feel proud and lucky to call this city, this country, my home.  It is the day I allow myself to recall those abandoned cars, that Times photograph.  As I have said before, there is not an emotional pie.  An individual feeling sadness about an event does not mean that there is less room, less left of her, to feel other things.  It does not mean that she cannot also step back and place our actions as a country into the bigger picture.  Sometimes, for me, it is just important to remember, and experience, those most basic emotions we were born with.

I dread September 11th because I cannot rationalize my emotions, all I can do is feel them.  On September 12th I can return to the world of international politics, of national responsibility, of the implications of actions.  I can insulate myself through my experience, my intelligence, my pragmatism, my life.  But for today, I will be rolling with a pack of tissues and I will not apologize for that.

Rebekah’s Official List of the Worst Jobs Ever to Have in NYC During a Heat Wave

18 Jul

On a walk down 5th Avenue today in the height of heat (well, let’s be honest, basically every time feels like the height of heat this week) and after seeing some idiot running on the sunny side of the street without carrying water, I started thinking about some of the jobs that I would absolutely hate to have during this heat wave.  To be fair, most of the jobs I am about to list are jobs that I would hate to have at basically any time but right now they seem especially unpleasant.  Also, I am pretty sure that these jobs can fit into one of the three following categories, or some combination of multiple categories, thereby making them especially awful:

(1) Jobs that involve mostly being in the out of doors during the sunny part of the day and especially those jobs that include intense, or even not so intense, physical exertion of some kind;

(2) Jobs that involve dealing with things that are stinky which are necessarily made extra stinky by the oppressive heat;

(3) Jobs that involve dealing with the public because, let’s be honest, the heat makes people crazy.

These items appear in no particular order mostly because the heat has made me too lazy to come up with any sort of scoring system to make ordering them make sense.  Also, if you have suggestions for jobs I might have forgotten, feel free to send them along and if they might my highly rigorous standards (AKA as long as they are funny and/or things that I would hate doing) I will add them in!  And without further ado, Rebekah’s Official List of the Worst Ever Jobs to have in NYC During a Heat Wave.

1. Sanitation worker2. The people who clean out the port-o-potty’s in Prospect Park or, let’s be honest, anywhere at all
3. The counter person in one of those trendy, or not-so-trendy, food trucks
4. Traffic cop, both the people who give out tickets and the people stuck standing in the middle of the asphalt surrounded by hot and angry drivers who they have to tell where they can and cannot go (wearing pants and one of those silly orange vests for safety)
5. The lady who sells empanadas (or as I like to call them, fried sandwiches) on 5th Avenue and then has to push her cart all the way back to Sunset Park which involves going uphill
6. Emergency response people
7. Door men at fancy hotels (sort of related question:  are there door women?  I have never seen one.)
8. Security guards who have to wear black t-shirts and stand outside looking tough.  In my experience looking tough makes you hotter
9. Delivery people for restaurants
10. Postal workers
11. Seriously pregnant women (that counts as a job, right?)
12. Someone working in an ice cream store that has run out of ice cream
13. Winder washers
14. People that lay asphalt
15. Anyone working on the roof
16. Camp counselors
17. People who work in the kitchen.  Believe me, I just boiled some peanut butter and honey and other shit to make homemade granola bars and basically almost died
18. Movers
19.  People who deliver kegs of beer to bars and have to somehow get them down the stairs and also people who deliver sodas and beer to grocery stores and bodegas
20. People who work in a store that’s air conditioner has broken or that has owners who are too cheap to buy an air conditioner and so not only are those people stuck working in the stuffy stuffy place in which they work, drowning in a pool of their own sweat, but also they have to deal with all the people who come in expecting a rush of coolness only to find stagnant heat and then they say something stupid like “what, no air conditioner?” and you have to try and not bite their heads off
21. People who have to wear costumes as part of their job.  This is not so common in NYC but I’m told we have that racist guy who runs around Central Park in an Elmo costume…although, come to think of it, he sort of deserves to be hot and uncomfortable (thanks, Paul Haney!)
22. Anyone who has to work in a basement with no air flow with a lot of machinery which overheat to the point where when they walk outside they actually feel cooler (Paul Haney again!)

So, that’s the list.  Feeling thankful (for once) that the bar in which I work is The Most Air Conditioned Place Ever.

Tags: , , , , , ,

You Live Here, Why Not Travel There: The Case for Sustained Female Tourism to India

12 Jun

I traveled to India for the first time in December of 2003 with 21 other students and a few professors.  We spent about 8 weeks learning about sustainability, the economy, tourism, ecology, agriculture.  We spent a good amount of time in the homes of different families who welcomed us with open arms  (well, for the most part).  I returned just after I graduated college in the fall of 2005 with a good friend of mine, Abby, and spent about 4 months traversing the sub-continent.  It was an amazing trip, cut short mostly by the fact that I had run my travel fund dry.  I spent my entire trip in the company of others and the only close-call of a sexual nature came at the hands of a fellow traveler.  I went back for a third time in the summer of 2011 with two of my girlfriends from graduate school, one of whom is fluent in Hindi.  This led to some surprised faces and a pretty awesome night in which the operators of a government bus hand delivered us to our hotel so we wouldn’t have to face tracking down an auto rickshaw after midnight on our own.  I would go back in a heartbeat if I could find a companion and if time and finances allowed.

So I must say I am more than a little saddened by the recent reports that, due to highly publicized sexual assaults in India, tourism has dropped, and especially amongst females.  A June 10th article on the New York Times blog, India Ink entitled “India Scrambles to Reassure Tourists Shaken by Recent Attacks on Women,” discusses the issue.  The article, by Neha Thirani Bagri and Heather Timmons, explains that in the first three months of this year visits by females to India fell by 35%.  Thisfall-off has been linked by many to the fatal gang rape of a 23-year-old student in Delhi this past December.  There have also been assaults and rapes reported by tourists over the last few months, including a 30-year-old woman who was gang-raped in a resort town in the north and a 39-year-old Swiss tourist who was raped by four men in Madhya Pradesh.  Listen, I get it, the prospect of being raped or sexually assaulted in a foreign country where you’re not familiar with the language, the customs, or the legal system and where you are far from home and your friends and family is terrifying.  But the thing is that, as a female, I live in almost constant, albeit dull, fear of being sexually assaulted and I think, when pressed, many women would agree.  In fact, I think you would be hard-pressed to find a woman in your life who has been neither threatened with sexual violence nor had sexual violence committed against her.  For my part I have been groped and spit on in the street, been the victim of an attempted rape in my own home, and ran screaming from the house of someone I considered a friend, although not a close one, when my strong and loud repetition of the word “no” went unheard.  My stories are not unique.  And every single one of them happened here, in the United States.

That’s not even the point.  I am not here arguing that there are more rapes in the United States than elsewhere.  I don’t know that we could ever accurately know that given the poor reporting rates at the global level, a fact I have discussed elsewhere in this blog.  Clearly, I have spent more of my life here and so it would follow that most of the bad things that have happened to me also would have happened here.  What I am saying is that the articles covering the decrease in tourism have not done much to reverse this trend by encouraging a more nuanced discussion.  So, here’s my attempt.

As a commenter on an article I read said, India is a very big country, 1,269,219 square miles, with a lot of people living in it, over 1.2 billion according to the 2011 census.  There are places that are more safe and places that are less safe, much like here.  There are people who are likely to rape and people who are unlikely to rape, much like here.  In the Times article, the authors quoted a 24-year-old from San Francisco, Corinne Aparis, as saying “It scares me to think that there’s that type of deep hatred toward women — that just being a woman is enough of a target and reason for some men to inflict such violence on me.”  The thing is, she could be talking about anywhere.  This quote is taken as something specific to the Indian context but that could not be further from the truth.  For evidence of that fact just watch the movie Compliance, read about the Cleveland, Texas gang rape of an 11-year-old, talk to some of your female friends.

You know what is different about India?  The response.  I doubt we would have learned nearly as much about the horrific December Delhi rape if it weren’t for the response of Indians.  According to the Times article once again, “The public outrage over the December attack led to the passage of a new sexual offense law in March that imposes stronger penalties for violence against women and criminalizes actions like stalking and voyeurism.”  I personally do not remember a time in the United States when protesters lined the streets for a day, let alone weeks, in response to a rape and the subsequent handling of the case by authorities.  I do not remember a time in the United States when the national dialogue wasn’t seemingly dominated by the endless repetition of “boys will be boys,” “why was she out at that time wearing that outfit,” and “where was her mother?”  Let’s just think back to the recent events in Steubenville.  Just this past Thursday, on June 6th, Mother Jones printed an article that reported that where the two rapists in the Steubenville case got a 1-and-2-year prison sentence, one of the hackers who broke the case open is facing up to 10-years in jail for hacking-related crimes.  To me, that says a lot about this country’s priorities.

Listen, I am not saying that people’s feelings regarding safety when traveling are unjustified.  If you feel unsafe for any reason, that is your prerogative.  What I am saying is that let’s put this into a larger context.  This is not an India problem, this is an everywhere problem.  But I would go so far as to say that the Indian population at large, at least recently, has a much more proactive attitude towards securing safety from sexual violence for women and men, and towards ensuring the proper handling of sexual assault cases.  We should be so vociferous.  Rather than write India off as unsafe for women, we should follow in the population’s footsteps.  We should stand in support of sexual assault victims, try to get our justice system to do right by them, by us, and change our rape culture.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Jezebel: Stick with Women, Stay Away from GMOs

5 Jun

I’m sorry.  This is really long.

Okay, so, there was a time when in the mornings, after checking the headlines on the New York Times, I would head over to Jezebel and see what was happening in the world of women, as represented by feminists (some of them not so much) on Gawker’s payroll.  It was a pretty good way to keep up on all the happenings surrounding that Susan G. Komen debacle, gave me a link to an amazing speech by Sandra Fluke, and strengthened my extreme dislike for Donald Trump (I previously hadn’t thought that particular strain of dislike could be strengthened but there you have it).  In the last few months, however, I have found myself, for reasons I could not quite pinpoint, abandoning my daily visits to Jezebel.  Maybe it was because of those damn “thighlights” that I found both hypocritical and gender-normative, maybe it was the Jezebel staff-writer who had a few drinks at my bar and was a total asshole, or maybe it was the fact that the site was straying from it’s gender-focus and moving more in the body-snarking, celebrity-obsessing, semi-women related fluff direction.  Whatever the reason I didn’t have a particular aversion to Jezebel, more a feeling that we had just grown apart.  Until, that is, I read an article titled “Everyone Just Shut Up About GMOs.”

I don’t know if all you readers actually know me but here’s a little background.  I stopped eating meat when I was 11-years old because the texture grossed me out (still does!).  As I grew older I started having moral objections to the way we in the United States raise and slaughter our animals for consumption.  I don’t like the way we grow feed, the damage that concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) do to our environment, the lack of oversight of CAFOs and slaughterhouses at the state and federal level, the power the meat lobby has in Washington, the immunity that packaging plants seem to have to any regulation whatsoever, etc.  I could go on for days, literally.  This is not to say that you should stop eating meat or that I think any less of you if you do.  Educate yourself, if you want to (I know some good places to start), or don’t.  Your choice.  My interest in food and agriculture just sort of spread out from there and, during my junior year in college, I became incredibly interested in genetically modified organisms.  Over the last ten years or so, I have done quite a bit of reading on this topic so to come across an article on a relatively high-traffic site that was as poorly researched as this one was really infuriating.  I am actually sort of convinced that the author was being paid.  Let’s just look at some of Meagan Hatcher-Mays more…um…simple-minded points.

1. “A lot of people are wary of GMOs because of long-term public safety and health concerns. These fears are misplaced—not only are genetically modified foods regulated by the same rules as ‘regular’ food, but there is also a broad consensus in the scientific community that genetically modified food is safe to eat”

If GMOs are regulated by the same rules as regular food, we are fucked seeing as how regular food is hardly regulated.  Or, more specifically, that regular food is regulated in such a way that protects industry over consumers.  Ever heard of “veggie libel laws?”  Or the story of Stephanie Smith, a children’s dance instructor, who ate an ecoli-tainted burger in 2007 that rendered her paralyzed, with cognitive problems and with severe kidney damage?  Her case was settled in 2010 largely because she was profiled by the New York Times in 2009, lending her experience the added boost of national interest.  Also, there is no scientific consensus that genetically modified food is safe. Short-term studies seem to reveal it is fine, but GMOs have not been on the market long enough for anyone to decisively say they do not cause long-term harm.

2. “Monsanto… has genetically modified its seeds to make crops resistant to pests, herbicides, and disease. But the crops’ ability to repel these dangers reduces the need for pesticide use, which is actually good for the environment.”

Actually, no!  The result of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready seeds have resulted in the creation of super weeds, against which Monsanto’s seeds are not resistant.  This is because of evolution!  As it turns out, weeds and insects also want to survive and will evolve over time to be able to tolerate the use of Roundup.  The result is that farmers all over the United States are forced to use greater amounts of more hazardous pesticides in order to deal with this new generation of pests.  This was discovered by Charles Benbrook, who is a research professor at the Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources at Washington State University.  He found that herbicide use has increased by 527 million pounds from 1996 to 2011, and although insecticide use had initially decreased by 123 million pounds,  it is now on the rise.

3. “GMOs can provide much-needed vitamin supplements for populations that are deficient. Two ounces of golden rice can provide almost 60% of the recommended daily intake of vitamin A.”

Here, Hatcher-Mays completely disregarded the scandal revolving around the tests of “golden rice.”  This rice was tested on children in China without the proper research approvals and without informing the parents of the children that the rice was genetically modified.  As someone who enjoys occasional forays into academia, this fact is incredibly problematic and also reinforces the feeling that many consumers have that they are not being provided proper information regarding their food by the agricultural industry.  Hatcher-Mays insistence that people against GMOs are therefore against poor people shows her inability to do even the smallest amount of research into the topic: I found a wealth of information in a 5 second Google search. Treating the poor as guinea pigs is not exactly a good thing.

Also, “golden rice” is not as new as Monsanto and other GMO supporters might have you believe.  I learned about it when I was in India in 2004 and Marion Nestle, a professor of Nutrition and Food Studies at NYU published a letter to the editor about it in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association in 2001. In her article she does not completely dismiss the usefulness of biotechnology in reducing diseases caused by vitamin deficiency, but she does state that simply adding vitamin-B to rice neglects to address the other biological (necessary enzymes and dietary fat) and political forces that are needed to truly deal with this deficiency.

Listen, maybe golden rice will be helpful in the future.  More tests need to be carried out to that effect and probably the scientists should inform their subjects of their role in the study and also the contents of the food they are eating.  Also, internet writers in the United States should shut up about their desire to feed “poor, nonwhite, non-American, non-British human beings” if they haven’t done even a modicum of research into the surrounding debate.  Repeating mistakes made at Tuskegee is probably not the best approach.  Also, to trick ourselves into thinking that big-Ag is doing anything positive without thinking primarily about PR campaigns and its own ever-deepening pocket is simply naive.  These companies are far-more concerned with making money than with solving world hunger.  The state of agriculture in the United States is horrific and to think that big-Ag has any intentions other than expanding into growing markets is ridiculous.  Whether or not GMOs are dangerous to human health when consumed has still not been proven, but the fact that they are incredibly dangerous to the environment at large (water usage, increased herbicide and pesticide use, monocropping, etc) has been proven time and again.  So, probably people shouldn’t be self-righteously telling those who know more than them to shut up about GMOs.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Miranda and the Public-Safety Exception

30 May

I read this quote yesterday from the Supreme Court case of Ex Parte Milligan* which was decided in 1866:

“The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances.”

This all made me think about the public-safety exception to the Miranda warning against self-incrimination.  So the deal with Miranda for those of you who don’t (a) watch a lot of Law and Order or (b) read a lot of legal things is that if a suspect is questioned before he is read his rights then those statements are not admissible in court.  According to this article, the public-safety exception was first introduced in 1982 by Sol Wachtler, the former chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals.  The case that is invoked in any debate over the constitutionality of the public safety exception is New York v. Benjamin Quarles.  The Quarles case went as follows:  in 1980 a woman in Queens flagged down a police cruiser and told the officers that she had been raped by an armed man who subsequently fled into a grocery store.  The officers then went into the store, corned Quarles, frisked him and upon seeing his empty gun holster asked him, before reading him his rights, where the gun was.  He gestured towards an empty carton of detergent, the cops retrieved the gun, and then they read him his rights.

After that it all gets kind of confusing for me.  The law and math are two things that always sort of make my brain into a pretzel.  In the end it seems as though this action was allowed because it was spontaneous as opposed to planned out.  I suppose it couldn’t really have been planned out because this was the case that established the public-safety exception which basically says that if the police think that there is a clear and present threat of danger to the public, and that a suspect possesses information that can put an end to that threat, the police can question that person before reading him his Miranda rights without officially violating the established procedure. (Did that make sense? Because I totally just confused myself.)  I do get the sentiment behind it but I also think that if we think about it in keeping with the aforementioned quote, it is a bit of a problem.  Maybe I would be singing a different tune if I was in the middle of a public safety emergency and there was some person who had all the information and because of Miranda wasn’t saying anything.  Or maybe I wouldn’t be because Miranda has protected far more people than the public-safety exception and, in the grand scheme of things, is worth protecting at all costs.

Or maybe I am having too simplistic a view of all this.  Maybe I am being too idealistic.  I just think that no matter what we do, no matter how evil it might be, we are still human.  Part of the purpose of the law in this country, as I understand it anyway, is that it is there to protect people.  Sometimes that means that through improper action of the police or legal teams, guilty people go free and they commit horrible crimes again.  In a perfect system, that would not be the case.  But the reason we have things the way that we have them is so that we can check the system, so we can make sure that people are being treated equally despite their race, class, religion, gender, or whatever.  And things still aren’t perfect.  I just think that given the way that things are going, having this public-safety exception is more dangerous than anything else; it’s a slippery slope.  At a time when people are afraid of things is precisely the time when government has more leeway to overstep historical boundaries, and it is also the time when we need things like the law to keep that in check.

Then again, maybe I need to think more about this. Either way, I really like that quote.

*This was one of the first cases decided after the end of the Civil War and said that as long as civilian courts are still operational, it is unconstitutional to try a civilian in a military tribunal.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Sometimes I Hyperventilate

21 May

You know when you have the smallest little bit to do of something you have been working on for the longest time ever but you just can’t seem to wrap your head around doing it so instead you sit at your computer and read the news and watch funny videos?  No?  Well, then, I just don’t know what to say to you.  Yes? Read on for a ramble!

So I have been working on my master’s degree basically forever.  Sometimes, when I am mad at myself for ever getting into this in the first place I think back to the day when I found out I got into my program.  I was convinced when I applied that there was no chance.  Then, one day, after a run I checked the mail and inside the little mailbox was a letter from The New School.  I ran upstairs, opened the letter, read that I was accepted and immediately started hyperventilating.  That’s this new thing I have been doing the last couple of years.  I seem to have grown into a person who is simply incapable of handling big batches of emotion all at once.  Case in point: a few months ago I was on a run, listening to Ira Glass on This American Life.  This particular episode (is that what a radio show is called? Is installment better? I should look this up..) was about an entire town being disappeared in the 1980s in Guatemala.  Everyone in the town was killed except for these two little boys who were found recently and one of them was reunited with his dad who had been out of town the day it was disappeared and thought his entire family was dead but in reality his youngest son was alive the whole time and living with the person who had orchestrated the whole disappearance.  Anyway, there is this whole big story with a reunion and it was really very emotional and there I was running and running and listening to it and trying not to cry but occasionally having to pull over on the side of the park to hyperventilate.  Crying and running at the same time is no bueno.  It was not my finest moment.  I don’t know why I thought it was a good idea to listen to that podcast while running but, yea, that’s me.  I am good at making decisions.  Anyway, back to the original story.  When I got my acceptance I immediately started calling people:  my parents, my boyfriend at the time, other people.  And wouldn’t you know it? No one answered the phone.  So there I was, standing in my living room, jumping around and also kind of crying, all by myself.  I basically couldn’t breath and thought I might die from happy.  Now that WAS my finest moment.

So anyway, here I am all these years later, finishing up this degree that has at sometimes been empowering and sometimes been incredibly frustrating and infuriating and I want more than anything to be done with it but I just can’t seem to make myself work through the final push.  I am getting in my own way, as I love to do.  I erect these little unnecessary barriers for myself, and then I have a stress attack and an anger explosion but the anger is always directed at myself because I am fully aware that I am just making it difficult for myself for no real good reason.  I like doing that I guess.  (Again, good at decision making.) Makes it all the more exciting when I persevere.  Like, the other week I realized that I had forgotten to fill out my application for graduation.  It was available online all semester long and I just never clicked on the link.  It would have taken me 5 minutes.  So then I got all stressed and was convinced they wouldn’t let me graduate and also was embarrassed by my own idiocy so I kept putting off doing it and then when I finally did it it took like 2 minutes and was so not a big deal.  But this was like, 2 weeks of stress.  I think I got a new wrinkle from forgetting to fill out my form.

Anyway, that’s me and that is what I do.  So I am going to close all my funny videos and stop reading about the tornado in Oklahoma (so sad!) and get back to work.  And I am going to take my dad’s advice.  A few weeks ago I was on the phone with my dad and I was stressing out about all the work I had to do and my dad just said to me, “Rebekah, get whatever it is in your head that is keeping you from doing this out of your head and just do it.  You are almost there.  The only person in your way is you.”

So, get out of the way, me!  Let’s do this!

Tags: , , , , , ,

Sharing is Caring

6 May

I am really busy finishing up school stuff (first thesis draft submitted yesterday!), dealing with my life, and entering this contest through The Guardian to get something I write published (thanks to Keesler for putting it on the listserv!) so I have been neglecting my blog. Also, my brain has been so consumed by the aforementioned things that I have been having a hard time formulating an opinion on basically anything.  Except eggs.  I have been eating a lot of eggs and enjoying them.  So, eggs are good. Opinion formulated. Anyway, because I have no interest, at this current moment, in writing a full blog about my appreciation for eggs as of late, I am going to share with you* all a few quotes that I have discovered over the past few months that relate to writing that I found really…inspiring.** So, here they are!

1. John Patrick Shanley: “Writing is acting is directing is living your life…I see no difference between writing a play and living my life.  The same things that make a moment in my life succeed, combust, move, these things make a moment in my playwriting have life.  And when I move in my writing, I have moved in my life.  There is no illusion.  It is all the same thing.”

2. C. Wright Mills: “By keeping an adequate file and thus developing self-reflective habits, you learn how to keep your inner world awake. Whenever you feel strongly about events or ideas you must try not to let them pass from your mind, but instead to formulate them for your files and in so doing draw out their implications, show yourself either how foolish these feelings or ideas are, or how they might be articulated into productive shape. The file also helps you build up the habit of writing. You cannot `keep your hand in’ if you do not write something at least every week. In developing the file, you can experiment as a writer and thus, as they say, develop your powers of expression. To maintain a file is to engage in the controlled experience.”

3. John McPhee, in a letter to his daughter: “Dear Jenny: The way to do a piece of writing is three or four times over, never once. For me, the hardest part comes first, getting something  — anything — out in front of me.  Sometimes in a nervous frenzy I just fling words as if I were flinging mud at a wall.  Blurt out, heave out, babble out something — anything — as a first draft.  With that, you have achieved a sort of nucleus.  Then, as you work it over and alter it, you begin to shape sentences that score higher with the ear and the eye.  Edit it again — top to bottom.  The chances are that about now you’ll be seeing something that you are sort of eager for others to see.  And all that takes time. What I have left out is the interstitial time.  You finish that first awful blurting, and then you put the thing aside. You get in your car and drive home.  On the way, your mind is still knitting at the words. You think of a better way to say something, a good phrase to correct a certain problem. Without the drafted version — if it did not exist — you obviously would not be thinking of things that would improve it.  In short, you may be actually writing only two or three hours a day, but your mind, in one way or another, is working on it twenty-four hours a day — yes, while you sleep — but only if some sort of draft or earlier version already exists. Until it exists, writing has not really begun.”

So, with that, happy Monday.  It is Monday, right?

*A demonstration of how much I care!

**Due to current brain state (fried!) it took me way too long to come up with that word.

Tags: , , , , ,

When I Realize I’m My Own Worst Enemy

29 Apr

These lyrics from Ben Folds Five pretty much sum up how I am feeling right now:

She says, “Everywhere I go, damn, there I am.”

Here I am, sitting at the study center, working on my thesis while regularly checking my email to see if an old professor of mine, a professor to whom I still owe a paper, a paper whose completion, or lack thereof, will determine my ability to graduate from this damn program in a little over a month, will allow me to actually write the paper after all this time.  And I really want to be mad at someone about it.  I want to be mad at the professor for making the classroom environment, and therefore my learning experience, so massively unpleasant.  I want to be mad at the two professors who attempted to advise me earlier in this thesis process and, through their utter lack of engagement, made me feel dumb and inadequate.  I want to be mad at the tendency of academia to celebrate those who publish more than those who teach better, for causing my program to lose so many talented professors while keeping people who act as though teaching is a small requirement they must fulfill en route to raising their own status in the field.  But when it comes down to it, that would just be a technique in avoidance.  That would just be an attempt to place the blame on someone else when, in reality, it lands squarely on my shoulders.  I am the one who didn’t write the paper.  I am the one who let the actions of others determine my perception of my own self-worth.  I am the one who put all this off until the last possible moment when I knew I would already be at a loss for time and drowning in deadlines and stress.  I am the one.  Only me.  And sometimes that is the hardest thing to deal with.  But here I am, dealing with it, and figuring out how to get out of my own damn way.

If only I was flexible enough to kick my own ass.

Tags: , , ,

Today in Ridiculous: New Bill to End Flight Delays!

26 Apr

Hear ye! Hear ye! Read all about it!  Today, the day before the Senate leaves town for a week, they did the unthinkable: they passed a bill.  Unanimously.  What did they pass, you might ask?  Well, I’ll tell you.  As the title of this blog suggests, they passed a new bill to end flight delays.  Oh, thank god.  Seriously, you guys, that is like the most pressing issue I could possibly imagine.  On time flights for all!

Okay so listen.  There was this one time when I was going to visit my extra-super-awesome friend Meredith in Portland, Oregon in like, I don’t know, 2008?  So long ago.  I had been working at a restaurant in the West Village where my schedule was as follows: Thursday, Friday, Saturday nights 6pm-2am or later if needed, Sunday, Monday nights 4pm-12am, or later if needed, and Tuesday lunch, 10:30am to 4pm.  At the same time I was training for a marathon and had speed workouts on Wednesday nights and long training runs on Saturday mornings.  Needless to say I had very little “me” time.  I was very excited for my 4-day Portland adventure, which I had scheduled months in advance.  The day of the trip I traveled, by subway, to JFK to catch my nonstop flight to Portland.  Upon arrival, I was informed that my flight had been cancelled due to “lack of crew.”  Um, what? Instead, they flew me to Washington, DC to catch a connecting flight to Portland.  Fine.  When I arrived in DC they told me there was no flight to Portland, so I would have to spend the night in DC, fly to Chicago the next day and then on to Portland from there.  I would arrived at 4pm on Saturday, about 32 hours after I walked out the front door of my apartment building in Brooklyn.  Not going to work.  I asked the lady if I could just fly back to New York and change my trip.  No, because, somehow, flying to DC because the company had fucked up and then, as a result, flying back to New York would have used up the tickets I bought plus my free ticket and so I would have basically just flown to and from DC just for fun.*  Finally, after much attitude on the part of me, she got me on a flight to San Francisco for that night. I would then spend the night in San Fran at the airline’s expense, and then fly on to Portland the next morning. I would arrive there at 10am.  Twenty-six hours after leaving my house.  I took it, but not after I gave the lady a piece of my mind which resulted in me getting escorted out of the line by security.  It was not my finest moment.

Anyway, that whole experience sucked.  (The trip to Portland was, as expected, so great! I want to go back!  Meredith, when can I come back?!) Anyway, so I get it, flight delays are awful.  But seriously?  THIS is the thing we are so excited about?  That the Senate managed to pass a bill to “ease impacts of cuts on air traffic?”  Okay, so let me just give you a couple of really fun little quotes from this article I read in, where else, The New York Times.**

Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said “I am so happy that we were able to work together across the aisle in a bipartisan way to solve this problem.  It’s nice to know when we work together we can really solve problems.”

I just have to say that I am pretty sure that I learned the lesson of working together in like, kindergarten, but some people just take a little longer.  Also, I would just like to say that cuts to air traffic control that results in flight delays certainly results in inconveniences but I would hardly call this a problem.  Problems, to me, are cuts to education, to social security, to infrastructure development and maintenance.  You know, stuff like that.  But what do I know.

And Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, had these words: “At some point, we have to admit the best thing is to find another $2 trillion in debt reduction by looking at revenue, closing some loopholes and bringing down the debt with some spending cuts, but not ones like this.”

Oh, no, not cuts like that!  Never cuts like that!  I mean, cuts to air traffic control is totally insane and I can’t believe we ever in a million years thought about doing it, let alone actually did it.  I know!  Let’s take money from other parts of the transportation budget and just, you know, move it to air traffic.  Like, let’s not invest in high speed rail.  That was a dumb idea, anyway.***

Then there’s this. Republicans are accusing the Obama administration of “mismanagement of the cuts, at best and intentional infliction of pain at worst” (emphasis mine).  And then also, this: “Republicans — and some Democrats — have been pushing for much of the month for a rescue of the air traffic control system, charging that President Obama was intentionally extracting maximum pain on the traveling public to illustrate the costs of the cuts, called sequestration.”

I know that last paragraph is redundant but I feel like if The Times can have both those sentences in one article, so can I.  Anyway, here’s the thing.  Maybe the Senate wants to prove to the American public that, after the debacle involving the failure of the background check bill which 90% of the population supported yet still couldn’t get through the Senate because Senators are “doing what their constituents want” (!!!!!) that it can actually accomplish something.  Well done, Senate, you get a gold star.  But give me a break.  I mean, sure, when I fly I want on-time departure and on-time arrival.  I think we all do.  But let’s not act as though we are solving some huge, life-shaking issue.  Let’s not be so sensationalist that we start talking about how Obama is intentionally fucking with your life, travelers, to show you that spending cuts suck. What this is to me is the whining of a bunch of people in the leisure class who are pissed that their lives are inconvenienced by something that they themselves pushed for.  They wanted spending cuts, they just didn’t want it to impact them.  So why don’t we go ahead and solve this problem and let all our spending cuts occur on the backs of the poor.  So carry on, travel class!  We’ll get this economy back on track but don’t worry, you won’t feel a thing.

*I was young and stupid back then and didn’t know the full potential of letter writing.  If this happened today, I would write the shit out of some letters (and, obviously, post them here).

**I know it might not seem like it but I do, in fact, read things other than The Times.  I read The New Yorker.  Also, books.  Also, all of the comments written on that grumpy cat internet meme.  I want that cat.

***I don’t know that this is where the money is actually coming from but I am feeling especially snarky this morning so, whatever.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →