it's here.....

SAM is about to open and all those skeptics and haters (you can include me in some of that) maybe need to giver her a second chance? $1 billion in new art. $1 BILLION! she's trying! and things like this this and this and this and the fact that the building is one big MOMA ripoff, give me hope! i mean nothing will replace my henry and frye, but sometimes you just want to go visit a pollock and spend a gazillion dollars on mondrian drinking glasses. i'm a sucker for a good museum gift store (National Gallery anyone?) though i will say, $13 admission? what are you, the EMP? not cool sam, not cool.

jackpot?

saturday we take the boat out, come back up to the marina parking lot and what do we find? someone has thrown out their 40+" samsung lcd television. we suspect the owners of the mega yacht a few slips over, who adam claims he saw pawing over a new big screen the other day. regardless, it is now in my apartment. so adam manhandles this thing for two days (parking lot to car to boat to cameron's car to my house), we plug it in and bravo! it works! for a minute! the lamp is blown. but cheap fix for a $2k television, right? worth it, right? $200 and I get a real television that can handle katamari damancy and some sexy setup with my macbook, right? RIGHT. so now i have this GIANT television eating up half a wall in my tiny apartment, that I refuse to give up on. REFUSE. just so you understand the severity of this bargain, let me explain my current television. in, say, 1994, my parents bought about ten of those giant black box mitsubishi tvs. i have been dragging one of them around from apartment to apartment since i was 18. now 13 years old, this bad boy is still kicking. i even have the original remote, if that gives you any inkling into how well i've cared for this thing. it is a perfect 2x2x2' cube. born before the days of dvds. baby doesn't have anything but a "cable in" and a power button. i've spent the last five years running a dvd player through a vcr, with the most elaborate speaker hook up you can imagine. it's time to let him fade away.... also samsung related: dudes, remember when you wooed me with your blackjack and convinced me that by bumping up its memory i could also use it in lieu of a new mp3 player? remember? also remember how you failed to tell me that no one on this planet sells a pair of headphones compatible with your special little headphone port? i do! you're on my shitlist.

doing

i was standing in our empty office eating my lunch, looking out the window and watching one of the school's gardeners carefully arrange twenty five or so plants in an empty flowerbed. sometimes (a lot of times) i think about quitting everything and adopting a trade like gardening. some trade where i can use my hands a create something. sit outside and dig holes and arrange fauna and understand the properties of potting soil. tactility. that's what i'm after. this is what happens to the dreams of a 23 year old woman when she spends too much time in a windowless office with only her excel spreadsheets to keep her company.

quiz

so last night we partook in some quizzing at the george and dragon. and i can admit proudly that i was the only one at the table who knew that it was jane seymour who played solitaire in 'live and let die.' in the end, we lost to some nerd wearing a scrunchi in his hair. cause he could identify an inverted and upside-down picture of hudson's bay. shove it, ponytail.

hank

so to finish my museum studies program i'm now doing a weekly blog for the Henry Art Gallery! check it out here: http://hankblog.wordpress.com i have quite an enormous crush on the Henry, so we can officially classify this as "kind of a big deal."

writing for real

i've been running around like crazy the past few days. i spent yesterday morning interviewing a reporter from the times. fantastic guy. anyways, i wrote a profile of him this morning. here i like constructive criticism! edit: link is fixed!

kiva.org

i was watching frontline last night and there was a short segment on a microlending organization called 'kiva.' grassroots, based out of san francisco, the company runs a (dare i say?) e-dating-style site that matches people over here up with entrepreneurs in third world countries through small business loans. they have incredible infrastructures set up within these countries so the money actually makes it to the people who need it, and the borrowers are held to their promises to pay back their loans. the company boasts a 100% repayment track record, and notes "In the past 30 years, over 100 million of the world's poor have received a micro-loan and demonstrated a >95% repayment rate." the frontline segment was fascinating. it focused primarily on one business owner in uganda and the effect of loans within her small community. the town as a whole gathers together to decide democratically who should and should not be allowed to apply for the loans. what's great, is that lenders are allowed to contribute as much as they want. so the effect is you have these communities of 15-20 lenders who have all banded together to help someone in uganda manage her peanut butter business, or a cambodian man expand his grocery store. and everyone receives updates. and everyone eventually gets their money back, to then invest in another venture. i'm certainly no econ expert, but from what i've read, microlending has made an enormous impact on communities across the world. when you take out the beaurocracy and the predatory lenders and make it a face-to-face transaction, money gets to people who can put it to use, empower themselves and their families, and in turn, build up sustainable communities. all of the industrial nations in the world had to start at some point with creative, resourceful, proactive and driven people trying to make the best of their resources. i am all about supporting this. visit their site kiva.org and find someone whose story resonates with you (ignore the initial dating-service-esque vibe) and let them borrow $25. man the internet is amazing sometimes.

thursdayfriday roundup

best thing about working for a jesuit university? paid catholic holidays! tgigf, or something. some tidbits: - if you live in seattle and haven't looked outside yet, do so. can you believe it? it's 75 degrees. i ran to volunteer park and back today at lunch, and my lungs didn't freeze. hallelujah! - you can't believe how difficult it is to give away free labor. i've been trying to pawn myself off to a local museum for the past month, to no avail. w-t-f. i'm a decent, cupcake-baking human trying to give you 30 hours of my time. W-T-F. - one of my colleagues gave me free tickets to a pnb dress rehearsal last night and i had the chance to see mark morris' 'pacific' from one of the best seats in the house...for free! when sharon cumberland ("blah i went to private school in italy blah blah antonio banderas fan club blah") made us watch a documentary on mark morris in sophomore brit lit class, i wrote him off, assuming that anything she recommended was full of pretense and assholishness. i was wrong. wrong wrong wrong. this dance was incredible. the staging was brilliant. the costumes were brilliant. the indian influenced dancing was brilliant. go see it: http://www.pnb.org tickets are cheap. - so i guess minis are back? i went shopping last weekend and bought what i thought were "tunics"/long shirts but was told by the fashion consultants on the today show this morning that short dresses are the cat's meow. and i mean SHORT. this is one of those timeless signs of getting older: the inability to wear anything in public that may accidentally show off my ass. i just can't do it anymore. - we are headed to pdx tomorrow afternoon and i couldn't be more excited to spend some time in my 2nd favorite city. speaking of pretentious assholes, there's an itsy damien hirst exhibit at pam which will be a top priority this weekend. if you don't know damien hirst, you should, even if he just makes you angry. he's an asshole. a brilliant, art-factory owning, i-copyrighted-and-then-sued-british-airways-for-using-colored-polka-dots asshole. love him!

wtf indeed!

i had low hopes for the morning until i stumbled across wonkette and found my east coast partner in sass. it's like thesuperficial for things that actually matter. and this video: no need to pay attention to anything but cheney. you don't even need to have the sound turned on. "We are going to have nightmares about this for a week. The Vice President is from a goddamn David Lynch dream sequence." i can't stop laughing.

a good man is hard to find

i had a wonderful weekend, beginning and ending with good friends, with some gourmet frito pie thrown in for good measure. kate is well. olive is well. no complaints can be heard from apartment 48. when i started this blog again, i was hoping it would force me to write about, synthesize, contemplate what the hell is going on in this world. i failed to factor in how truly depressing the state of the world is at this moment. staying informed has turned out to be a masochistic effort. i need some inspiration this monday morning. i immediately thought of sarah vowell, one because i missed her for the bazillionth time this weekend, and two because when i think of people with the most impassioned love/hate relationships with this country, i think of her. at one point, the full text of my favorite sarah essay "the nerd voice" was online, and i'm failing to find it right now. i found an excerpt i quoted in a blog years ago and it goes something like this: "I wish that in order to secure his party's nomination, a presidential candidate would be re­quired to point at the sky and name all the stars; have the peri­odic table of the elements memorized; rattle off the kings and queens of Spain; define the significance of the Gatling gun; joke around in Latin; interpret the symbolism in seventeenth­-century Dutch painting; explain photosynthesis to a six-year­-old; recite Emily Dickinson; bake a perfect popover; build a shortwave radio out of a coconut; and know all the words to Hoagy Carmichael's "Two Sleepy People," Johnny Cash's "Five Feet High and Rising," and "You Got the Silver" by the Rolling Stones. After all, the United States is the greatest country on earth dealing with the most complicated problems in the his­tory of the world-poverty, pollution, justice, Jerusalem. What we need is a president who is at least twelve kinds of nerd, a nerd messiah to come along every four years, acquire the Se­cret Service code name Poindexter, install a Revenge of the Nerds screen saver on the Oval Office computer, and one by one decrypt our woes." in my search for that, however, i ran across this again. and thought i'd share. it's lengthy and slightly dated, but if you strip off the time-specific bits, the meat of it will make your heart hurt. you can hardly believe it came from the mouth of a politician. for the lazies of you, this: "'We the people are--collectively--still the key to the survival of America's democracy. We--as Lincoln put it, "[e]ven we here"--must examine our own role as citizens in allowing and not preventing the shocking decay and degradation of our democracy. Thomas Jefferson said: "An informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will." The revolutionary departure on which the idea of America was based was the audacious belief that people can govern themselves and responsibly exercise the ultimate authority in self-government. This insight proceeded inevitably from the bedrock principle articulated by the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke: "All just power is derived from the consent of the governed." The intricate and carefully balanced constitutional system that is now in such danger was created with the full and widespread participation of the population as a whole. The Federalist Papers were, back in the day, widely-read newspaper essays, and they represented only one of twenty-four series of essays that crowded the vibrant marketplace of ideas in which farmers and shopkeepers recapitulated the debates that played out so fruitfully in Philadelphia. Indeed, when the Convention had done its best, it was the people - in their various States - that refused to confirm the result until, at their insistence, the Bill of Rights was made integral to the document sent forward for ratification. And it is "We the people" who must now find once again the ability we once had to play an integral role in saving our Constitution. And here there is cause for both concern and great hope. The age of printed pamphlets and political essays has long since been replaced by television - a distracting and absorbing medium which sees determined to entertain and sell more than it informs and educates. Lincoln's memorable call during the Civil War is applicable in a new way to our dilemma today: "We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.'" i didn't link those two pieces by accident. say what you will about celebrity al and his oscar, but don't ever tell me the man doesn't have a great mind.