As the world turns

A soap opera title for a soap opera life. My last post was over 4 years ago. In that time, in a nutshell, I separated from and then divorced my husband, fell in love with a new man with two children, became a de facto stepmom, got pregnant and had a child with said man, quit my job, tried to finish my dissertation, got a new job, bought a house, and am now raising a one-year-old girl, thirteen-year-old and fifteen-year-old stepsons, working full time, living a rich and strange and lovely life in san francisco. An amazing change. Topsy turvy hello who am I kind of change. So much failure. So much embracing newness. So much leaping into the abyss. So much forgiveness. But I know I'm not the first to have experienced this ocean opening sea change quantic shift. And so it is bizarre and satisfying and very mundane. The stuff that life is made of. The stuff of the world turning and going about its business as we all weave drama into our days. Perhaps I will be better at documenting this and everything else that inhabits my brain and itches my creative juices. Perhaps I won't. For now, I'm pretty proud of making this post and telling the world HOLY SHIT I changed my game and I'm better than ok.

Love is where the heart is

All materialism and saccharine Hallmark greeting cards aside, the spirit of Valentine's Day is well-intended. What's so wrong with having a day for reflecting on who we love and demonstrating a little extra tenderness?

In honor of a more holistic idea of love, I'm getting closer to the $100 mystery (and realizing I wish I had A LOT more than $100 to give!). There has been a sudden spate of cancer in my little world, from Claire's passing last December to the recent news of a respected scholar and former colleague of mine struggling to pay for his pancreatic cancer treatments. How can I creatively give to those suffering from cancer in a way that is both personal to me and meaningful to those who receive the gift? How can my giving add a little love and joy to the world?

Big questions, but a possible answer: My mother-in-law, Claire, embodied selfless and resilient love. She passed away from lung cancer a couple months ago after a brutal 14-month battle. During her treatment at Kaiser Hospital in San Francisco, she met many other cancer patients (often kids and young adults) going through chemo and radiation. The waits and treatments were long and boring, often in a large room full of other cancer patients. Perhaps $100 worth of books, magazines, games and blankets to keep those in treatment warm and entertained, in honor of Claire? I'm off to call Kaiser today to see what they might need!

As for the colleague, Carlos Ivan Degregori, I'll give my own money to the fundraising effort for his treatment. I suggest you do, too. Not only is he in great need, but he has devoted his entire life to seeking justice as the head of Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and is an inspirational embodiment of the way that love (of humanity, of human rights) can change the world.

If I had 100 dollars...

Courtney Martin is one of my closest friends, part of a small group of women who are truly my family. We are rooted in one of those consistently forever relationships, no matter how much time passes and how much distance settles between us.

Courtney also started this thing called the Secret Society for Creative Philanthropy back in 2005, which happened to be the very same year that I moved from New York City to San Diego. I wasn't able to attend the NYC inaugural event that year, and it was a painful moment when I deeply lamented picking up my comfortably-creative Brooklyn life and dropping it in the sunny expanse that is southern California. The SSCP's first meeting was one of those only-in-new york banter-full presentations mixing creative complaining with truly original ideas on how to change the world, quirky methods of engaging the city's 24-hour energy with irreverent acts of pleasure and joy. Missing it seemed to symbolize how much I had given up to pursue other life goals.

Still, Courtney is very good about keeping me informed about all her various pursuits and the rapid expansion of her SSCP to other cities, including San Francisco. Every year for the last six years I have listened to her account of the many creative ways that inductees imagine giving $100. And now...just about a half-dozen years since it began...I live in San Francisco, there happens to be a meeting coming up, and I was given $100 to pay forward. After so much time observing creative philanthropy, I am finally faced with the very real task of imagining giving myself.

It's funny when something that you've admired from afar is suddenly part of your life. All kinds of expectations and anticipations set in, despite Courtney's reassurance, "don't feel pressure, don't stress out about doing the best thing in the world."

What to do with $100? What would you do?

First, to honor Courtney, I will do something that requires no money at all. For years, she has urged me to write more (and more publicly). So in a completely narcissistic exercise of giving, back up goes the Blog! Sometimes giving our friends a reason to have faith in us is more important than anything money can buy.

And as for the money...I'm still brainstorming.

Disgrace:Resurrection

Life has happened, that roller coaster wrapped in cobwebs and haze. No need to rehash the many months between last post and this post, but I'm back and here is my commitment to myself. I am thinking about sound, space and uncertainty now...borders, violence, freedoms, cities, police, dancing, drugs and entertainment industries. And that is just on the professional tip. On the music side, following the cumbia wave and hoping to create my own contribution to that current. And personally, I'm engaged now. So I have a feeling the coming months of these blog meanderings will bring much to bear in the way of working towards a final dissertation topic, reenergizing my music-self, and juggling the wild ride of planning a wedding. Here I go...

survival tips 2 and 3

day two and i already messed up! there's no good excuse, unless you count skimming Craigslist ads for jobs and descending into a deep bout of depression prohibitive to blogging. which is what happened. so i skipped out on the computer, went to hot yoga, and spent the night watching Frank's Place (see photo above. and which, btw, is SO SO good if you're into representations of race, gender and class in 1980s New Orleans...).
**bonus tips! kick-your-ass yoga and good eighties TV! very healing for the soul!**

well, i'm making up with two distractions today.



First, Puppywar, a website that works akin to those Hot or Not voting sites popular a year or two ago. But it's for dogs. It's totally weird. And why are all the "Underdogs" of the poodle variety? Does this speak to some kind of anti-froufrou trend?

This recommendation is in honor of Slumdog-mania, the Obama search for a "First Puppy" annoyingly clogging the news these days, in addition to my conclusion that if my dissertation is gonna be about violence, it may as well involve cute animals.

Second, check this silly How to Write a PhD Dissertation website. I never get tired of anti-academic humor. it's got moments like:

"There comes a time in the life of every graduate student when she or he realizes that another two years of graduate school cannot be endured. Even though a year spent writing your thesis will be filled with frustration and angst, it will end up being worth it in order to escape school forever.

Remember the following phrase: "No one will ever read your thesis.'' You'll hear this phrase a number of times as you finish up, and it's vitally important that you believe it to be true. The phrase is important because without it you would be tempted to work on your thesis until everything is perfect, and you would never finish."

Not as good as PhD Comics, but worth a quick look.

Enjoy!

survival tips - part 1

As I wade through the sludge that is my qualifying process, I'm realizing I need to be more proactive about identifying and sharing survival tactics. Writing these papers is a slow and arduous exercise, and I'm more of a quick and painful kind of girl when it comes to composing my work. Having to tame the efficiency drive in me has been difficult enough, but I didn't anticipate the added attack on my confidence and psychological well-being. In any case, rather than griping about academic hoops or my decision to veer down this scholarly road (which I can do, at length, and just about every day), I'd rather put my 'suffering' to work!

Without further, tips for surviving the chinese water torture of qualifying...going to try to do one a day, mainly to remind myself there is fun to be hand even when the work never ends.

Tip number 1. Find a youtube video with an endearing performance by a child under the age of, say, twelve. My pick of the day:

building blocks

As a kid, my brother and I played with Legos obsessively. He more than I, but still, I've never forgiven myself for not taking the time to check out Legoland while living in San Diego. (yeah, that's a lego San Francisco alright...)

All the more exciting, then, to have two occasions to celebrate the joy of the building block this week. First, I saw a talk by James Rojas, an architect, planner and artist who uses found objects (Legos, yes, but buttons, blocks, sticks, shapes of all other kinds) to run community workshops on city design.

From what I gathered, he asks participants to build their utopian city with the objects at hand, which they then have to describe and explain to the group. Although it wasn't clear if he then works directly with redevelopment agencies or designers to implement these visions, but the exercise struck me as a useful step in simply starting to understand neighborhood, community and the built environment. I thought of the housing community where I taught DJing and music, Town and Country located in Southeast San Diego. It's isolated in a corner of San Diego that's carved through with freeways and impassable thoroughfares, dotted with an impersonal shopping center or two, and largely cut off (spatially and culturally) from the kinds of things people normally associate with that city - beaches, Sea World, surfing. It's also in one of the more violent, gang-ridden areas of the city, and these factors all combine to produce a fragmented and limited sense of city life.

I'd love to see what the kids i worked with would create when asked to visualize their community and reshape their neighborhood into a more appealing design. Instead of dreaming of "getting out" or trying to expose them to other parts of the city, how might we work with them to actually reinterpret and begin to re-use where they are actually at?

As for the second Lego-rrific moment? Christopher Niemann's tribute to New York, of course!