Category Archives: Life

I Went to Crystal Bridges (and I Didn’t Totally Hate It)

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A picture of Walmart

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I spend a week each winter in the Ozarks. Along with moving me back into Pepsi country, my family’s location near Fayetteville, Arkansas gives me front row seats to the strangeness that is Walmart money. Though the company is sort of fundamentally evil (and, unlike Coke, doesn’t fund my university*), the Waltons are present in some legitimately cool places in town. It’s hard to throw a stone and find a building that doesn’t have the Walton name painted somewhere on the front. Their money built the Fayetteville arts center, for example, and it’s hard for me to hate an arts center.

More recently, Alice Walton (daughter of Sam, the Walmart founder) decided to build an arts museum in Bentonville**. It’s entirely an American art museum, it’s funded seemingly entirely by companies that my hippie self is obligated to hate***, and it has the somewhat revolting name of Crystal Bridges. This year, my family got together and visited.

As much as I wanted to dislike the museum, I found it difficult to. It’s funded entirely by awful companies, but it’s also a completely free museum in the midwest. And—in part because of who made the museum—the collection is large and interesting. And when my family went, we didn’t just see the same folks you see at the High Museum here in Atlanta, who—in part due to the fact that it is really expensive—tend to share an outward class demeanor.

Based on the conversations I overheard, the people who were around us came from a variety of economic backgrounds. Most of them were not comparing the collection to other museums, leading me to assume that for reasons of money or distance this is probably the first reasonably accessible major museum most of them have been to in some time (or they’re just less judgey than the people I know, which is always an option).

I want to be annoyed by a museum that has Walton money all over it and a stupid name, but it is also so cool to me that they are using their money to at least make people recognize the midwest as a feasible destination for arts tourism—particularly when the American focus of the museum also encourages a consideration of Native American history and culture (albeit as portrayed by Euro-Americans, primarily) as a valid focus of cultural activity. The anthropologist in me approves of that.

The museum isn’t without its share of worrisome income streams. But, it also doesn’t suck. For those who are in Arkansas for one reason or another, the collection is definitely worth a look. If nothing else, there are two portraits of George Washington, and that’s pretty darn Ameri-tastic.

* Go Eagles!

** A town previously distinguished by having a neat toy shop and being the home of Walmart.

*** Goldman Sachs, Walmart, Tyson, and GE all feature prominently on an entryway wall.

My Pre-Travel Process Has Taught Me Some Uncomfortable Truths

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See, he has TWO passports.

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I have high hopes for my study abroad experience. If it’s anything like I’ve been told it will be, I’m in for several months of horizon-broadening, soul-searching, and digestive issues that will make for hilarious stories when I’m slightly removed from the whole experience. I am looking forward to it.

But what I had not anticipated was just how much I was going to learn from the pre-travel experience. I had naively assumed that—since I left for my holiday travels with everything sort of in check—I was more or less set to go already. This was incorrect.

For example, I’ve learned that getting anti-malarial medication that does not make you prone to hallucinations (possibly cool, but not recommended for the morose) or yeast infections (the seriousness of which the male doctor completely discounted and female nurse practitioner was completely conscious of) is crazy-making should you want to a) avoid spending $350 b) want to go abroad for more than 90 days. I have spent so much time on the phone shuttling my poor malarone prescription around digital pharmacies that the nurse at my travel clinic is now on a first name basis with me. If I get malaria, I plan to blame the people behind my prescription drug plan.*

I’ve also learned that the footwear that any individual possesses will be considered completely inadequate by everyone else she meets, even if she is traveling to an urban area and unlikely to be doing nature hikes. In my case, this resulted in a peer pressured (and somewhat panicked) eBay purchase of the sort of mary janes that have arch support and can best be described as “not offensively ugly.” They are the sort of shoes that one might wear with an a-line khaki skirt with some cargo pockets and a muted long-sleeve t-shirt from REI. The fact that I own neither of those articles of clothing did not stop me from buying the shoes.

But perhaps most importantly, the pre-travel process gives you some insight into yourself. Like, for example, knowledge of whether you’re the sort of person who will talk herself into a panic attack because TravelVisa sent her passport a week ago via USPS** and it hasn’t arrived at the house and what is going to happen if I don’t have my passport and my visa, I won’t be able to leave the country. For example.

I mean, it’s probably just delayed in the mail. Right? Nothing to worry about.***

* I have also learned that if you are uninsured, travel to a malaria-prone region is financially almost impossible. My drugs were going to be $350 as a copay.

** No, really. Yes, I know.

*** Totally something to worry about. It could have been lost or eaten by mail goblins, and you know how long it takes to get a new passport oh my god I am so screwed.

Making Stuff, Doing Things, Stubbing Toes

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My first semester of junior year is over. I’m not dead. I have all of my limbs, still, though my arms are uncomfortably sore and I think my kidneys are kind of twinging every time I move (at least one of those is from moving). All my earthly possessions—with the exception of some canned asparagus that I left my roommates, because I am a giver—are sitting in my parents’ house, waiting until I get tired of stubbing my toes on boxes for me to unpack them.

This was a weird semester. For one, I was kind of worried that I was going to get C’s in several of my classes, though so far that hasn’t happened. The experience has taught me that I’m no longer a good multiple choice test taker and that I have no ability to predict my own levels of success, which I could have told you four months ago without having to be reduced to manic hair-pulling during the semester, I’m pretty sure. Good to have my suspicions confirmed, I guess. Cortisol is healthy, right?

My major goal for the break is to finish the short story that I started early this semester and quit working on in order to spend more time on drinking heavily and whining about class. It involves zombies and booze. The other major plan is to push an ebook I wrote last semester through the painful process of being edited into something that won’t shame my ancestors into retroactive seppuku, and see about pushing it through Kindle land.

In the times when I’m not doing that, I’ll be busy moving back into the room that I’ll be leaving in two months, because my life basically consists of putting things into boxes and taking them back out in a somewhat irritating cycle. It’s either a terrible metaphor for my life or a sign that maybe I no longer need to bring a blow dryer with me everywhere now that my hair is two inches long.

My broader goal over the next couple of months is to start making some things. I don’t even care what, but my hands are itchy and my keyboard is getting all greasy because all I ever do is type. So, if everyone I know gets custom butter and some limoncello for Christmas? You’ll know that this is why.

Where I’ve Been

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So! It has been a very long time since I updated this. (Sorry, three people who have told me they have this on their Google Reader. I love you all! Especially the ones I live with!) That is mostly the result of a) a bout of depression at the beginning of the semester that, I shit you not, ended in me crying to “Punked Up Kicks” in my Civic outside of a barbecue restaurant (no, I don’t know either) and b) lots of writing/legitimate employment at all of my other jobs.

These things keep me busy, because you guys, it is hard to come up with a new version of “don’t be an asshole on Twitter” each week for 500 words. True fact. As much as I am thankful to have the job and love my coworkers, it is kind of burn outy sometimes. Such is employment in knowledge work land!

Most of my time, though, has been dedicated to wrangling passage to the exciting west African nation of Senegal for next semester. It has a jazz scene and a legacy of slavery and beaches, so basically there’s something for everyone. Including, hopefully, a visa for me!

Fun fact: the visa application for Senegal is like two pages long and appears to have been made in MS Word in 1998. It is the best. My friend getting a visa to Switzerland had to submit her high school diploma in triplicate. Third world is where it’s at, guys.

So, stay tuned for what will no doubt be another update in 4 months from now after I’m about to leave Dakar, illustrated with a YouTube video and a camera phone picture because that is how I roll. Thanks for tuning in, y’all.

Feeling Sad Weirds Me Out

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I am not a normal person when it comes to “feeling things” or “reacting to sad shit.” Rather than having all of my sadness points distributed evenly–like a Mario of suffering–I’m the sort of person who cries at dog commercials but not at things like the end of summer camps. I appreciate suffering, and I’m sad when bad things happen to other people, but I am not particularly expressive except when I’m experiencing sadness through the media–This American Life stories about the Khmer Rouge, or pretty much the entirety of Up. Celebrity deaths don’t bother me, usually, except in an abstract, “I feel sorry for their families, because that’s awful,” kind of sense.

So I was really quite surprised when I was as sad as I was when Steve Jobs died. I didn’t know him, and Apple hasn’t ever hosted me at an event. Though I use a Macbook Pro, I’m not an Apple fangirl. I didn’t watch the iPhone 4S release announcement.

I’m not the only person I know who’s had this same reaction. Most of the people who I’ve talked to who aren’t tech folks still felt sad, and most of them were surprised at it. It seems inappropriate, sort of, like we feel sad about this public figure because we’re supposed to.

My friend Cameron has an interesting post up about how he thinks our sadness at Jobs’ death is related to collective guilt about expecting him to be superhuman. I don’t know how much I believe in our culpability (Jobs was always pretty private, from what I can tell), but I do think the idea of collective grief and idols is interesting. Maybe that’s why we’re sad.

Amy Winehouse’s death was sad, but she was incredibly human–we may have provoked her death (I agree with Cameron more here), but we also saw it coming. Jobs was someone who, because we never saw any real personal insight into his life even when he got cancer, did seem vaguely superhuman. He had pancreatic cancer and survived for more than five years, which considering that the five-year rate on pancreatic cancer is 4%, is kind of insane.

I still feel weird about feeling sad about Jobs’ death. But I do, if for no other reason than it means that there’s 30 years where he won’t be making cool things any more. That, if nothing else, is something to be sad about.

Things I Have Discussed in an Academic Context This Week (And Professors’ Responses Therein)

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My favorite part of being an anthro major is that, in an attempt to make their lectures relevant to students, professors sometimes take things to strange places. The best of these are the ones that give you alarming insights into your professors’ lives and/or American cultural phenomena that you are otherwise unaware of.

Pubic Hair Shaving During Labor: “American hospitals do that? I mean, it’s a head. It’s not like it’s easy to miss.” There were hand gestures.

BDSM: “Some people find some aspects of this arousing in some contexts.” There were pictures.

Groundhog Day: “You mean High Holidays?” (I have a cold. Same professor as the first quote. When it was explained to her that Americans really do look at a small mammal for weather advice, she was somewhat taken aback and apparently delighted.)

May Day: “We build big poles and dance around them. They say it’s a cross, I say it’s a penis.”

Strong candidates that did not make the list this week include foreskins, asexuality, and episiotomies.

Week of Suck

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Y’all, it has not been a good week for me. In fact, it has not really been a good week for anyone I know. In order to keep ourselves from just laying down in dispair, my roommates and I have started a Week of Suck competition. Here are the options:

Me: On Wednesday, walked to the local taco place because they were having a fundraising night for my sister’s crew team. They screwed up my taco order with chicken instead of tofu, and then wouldn’t donate the proceeds from my order anyway. Then attempted to walk to a stand-up comedian, but gave up after the roommate I was going with didn’t get in touch because her phone had died and my taco was dripping on me. Went to volunteer at the women’s health clinic today, and managed to lose my keys in the rain for a panic-stricken twenty minutes because apparently God is mad at me. Told the volunteer coordinator I had rushed a sorority; she responded with, “Oh, you kidder!” I was not kidding.

G: In doing a project in iMovie for work, has managed to prompt the phrase “Wow, I’ve never seen that error message before!” not once, but twice. As a result, was forced to sit at a single computer and redo her project twice. Was going to go to a carnival today, after finally slogging through the iMovie project from hell, but was unable to because all of the rides were rendered unusable by the very rain that I was searching for my car keys in.

A: Computer hard drive failed earlier in the week, taking with it her project on urban poverty and a paper on Locke (about whom she has written roughly this same essay for three different classes). Came to the computer lab the next day in order to work on the paper. Apparently managed to render it read-only, meaning that when she sent her (now late) paper to her professor, it was only half a page long. He informed her of this. The paper was unrecoverable. Wrote the paper a third time. Sent it, and a receipt for her broken computer, to her professor. Was told by her professor that he could not use a PDF receipt and was asked if she could reformat it. Still does not have a computer.

B: Earlier this week, while working as a clinic aid, was shat on. Then, after depositing money in her account today, went grocery shopping for the first time in several weeks. At this point, she discovered that she had lost her debit card. Had to put everything back.

B wins, with A in second place. But seriously, world? Boo.

Friday Night, Time to Knap

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Yesterday, my friend Avery and I went flint knapping outside of the anthro building. For those who aren’t anthro majors/hill people, flint (or stone) knapping is the process of taking a large chunk of rock and turning it into a smaller, hopefully tool-like chunk of rock. Hobbyists use it to make arrowheads, which they exchange at “knap ins,” which are a thing that I am not even making up. The video above shows some of the gear required and the general strangeness of the process–if you see a giant chunk of bone on the table when he’s talking, that’s because it’s a moose bone that he makes stone tools with.

The professor above–who was a remarkably good sport about two undergrads showing up and demanding teaching, essentially–was helping us yesterday. He studies stone knapping techniques in the paleolithic era. Human stone tools from digs show an increase in complexity the nearer the dig gets to the present day, from this, to this, to this. The professor’s research (and the reason he was sitting around flint knapping on a Friday to begin with) is on what stone tools show us about the cognative abilities of the people who made them. He does this by scanning folks’ brains as they make stone tools.

It turns out that novices and skilled tool-makers light up different areas of their brains, and that the simpler tool styles (the monofacial ones, which can cut but are not great for chopping) light up older parts of the brain than more complicated tools. The question is whether advances in tool complexity represent the evolution of that more recent brain matter–they couldn’t make the tools until they had the ability to learn, visualize appropriately, and figure out some pretty complicated practical physics.

So Avery and I tried to make something. We tried to teach ourselves to stone knap last year, after seeing a video of Bruce Bradley. The thing that professors don’t tell you as much is that he’s pretty much the best flint knapper in this country, and despite how easy he makes it look it’s really hard. When we tried on our own, we were working with low-quality rock and no clue what we were doing, and wound up using the same technique to make blades as chimps have been shown to: we threw them at the ground until they shattered into smaller pieces. Yesterday, we fared a little better. Here’s what Avery made:

Though it doesn’t look like much, the scraper came from a much larger piece of flint, and is much better than what we got the first time. We’ll be going back next week, so hopefully I can try my hand at sucking a little less at banging rocks together.

Social Media and Reproductive Justice Nonprofits

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Recently, I’ve been volunteering at a women’s health clinic. They provide abortions, along with a wide range of other gynecological services, and so safety of staff, patients, and volunteers is a main priority. Though Atlanta is a fairly liberal area, it only takes one nut with a gun, etc.

Tonight, the outreach director at the center called me in to talk about how to best manage the social media for the center, as I have some experience managing social media for my internet day job. I love my internet day job! I sometimes am pretty sure that I don’t suck at it! So I am totally psyched to put some time in for this nonprofit. However, it quickly became clear that there are several really distinct challenges facing a reproductive justice organization (and, to some extent, any nonprofit) when it comes to managing social media presence that are not faced in the low-stakes world of internet technology writing. The main issues are:

Safety vs. exposure: This is particularly true with a reproductive rights organization, where people might actually shoot you. On the one hand, social media can be a godsend for nonprofits who are trying to organize people in meatspace in order to protest or support legislation. On the other hand, giving too much detail about where staff members can be found outside of the very secure offices opens up the opportunity for harm–which is particularly worrying if the organization is using the social media to gather volunteers and others who may not realize the danger of affiliation with the organization. Using the new Facebook groups, which automatically add members, may put someone in a compromised position if they don’t want a political cause (for example, a reproductive rights organization) showing up on their profile, and may put them in danger if they live with people who are not supportive. How do we best publicize events through social media, maintaining some of the impromptu strength of the medium, without putting anyone in harm’s way?

Multiple, independent programs within a single organization: My particular organization, like many nonprofits, has several initiatives going which target completely different audiences (for example: youth, Latin@s, and transmen all have programs targeted to them). A person interested in one program may not be interested in another program. How do we best manage information specific to each program while still making the organization’s main Twitter and Facebook feed useful to casual visitors? Is it fair to ask a user to follow multiple Twitter accounts or become a fan of multiple pages in order to get the information he or she needs? How do we maintain multiple accounts while reducing information overlap?

Limited staffing: Multiple accounts grow to the point where they require a dedicated staff member in order to maintain them or someone in each individual program to give up some of their time in order to maintain the individual program’s social media presence. This makes tracing accountability in case of an error quite difficult, and means that social media accounts may not be of consistent quality. Of course, most nonprofits don’t have the money to hire a person to manage these accounts full-time, and the job is often shunted off to an intern or a volunteer, who may or may not have any of the training required for the position and is likely a transient staff person at best.

Creating universal protocol: Figuring out a standard way each event is publicized so that it is traceable is key if social media is to be overseen by some central person for the organization. Do we tweet out a link to the Facebook event page in order to publicize? Does each event get its own group? Does the event get created by a staff person? Does it get linked to on the organization’s main page? One is either emphasizing uniformity while sacrificing in-depth knowledge of each event (if the job is centralized) or sacrificing uniformity while increasing the chances of a really qualified person managing the page (in the case of department-specific management).

Matching networks with target audiences: Social media have very different ethnic, class, and age makeups. For example, if an organization is targeting a program to Black teens, Twitter may be a good place to really focus energy. Cell phone-accessible sites in general may be good for youth targeting, and text messages are even better–particularly if it’s for something a teen may not want their parents knowing about. Facebook may be better for other audiences or for wider outreach for events which users don’t mind making public. Google+ is good for the nerds. All sites are not created equal if your audience is very specific, and nonprofit audiences frequently are.

I have an answer to literally none of these issues (though I am most comfortable with the audience targeting). I can’t think of any specific, small non-profits which are doing an outstanding job with social media other than Scarleteen. In particular, I’m interested to see if any organization with several specific, niche programs has figured out a way to solve the second problem, and if any repro justice organizations have mastered the first. Hopefully we’ll figure something out over the next couple of months.

Poets and Mathematicians

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“I stayed away from mathematics not so much because I knew it would be hard work as because of the amount of time I knew it would take, hours spent in a field where I was not a natural.”

— Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg is a poet, the author of my favorite poem. I’ve been thinking a lot about his quote this past week, which I’ve spent reading through the Zen Valedictorian articles over at Study Hacks. The articles are a better-expressed version of a life outlook that I’ve written about some on HackCollege, and which I espouse to anyone who will stand still in person: at some point, being the over-stressed, over-extended student in an attempt to be Tracy Flick will fail you. More importantly, even if it’s something that you can manage, at least for a little while, it’s still not an efficient use of your time. The students who stand out are the ones who become very good at something they enjoy. Colleges don’t tell their students that, though, and so you get the sort of student that the Zen Valedictorian articles are critiquing–over-worked and not particularly outstanding.

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