"Everyone is a capitalist - until you remind them that they are not supposed to be.”

ha!

i've definitely been more capitalist than i profess or want to be lately. the arrival of summer (and the fact that i no longer have any credit card debt to send all my extra money to) has send me into a little bit of a spending spree...and it's a helluva guilty pleasure.

i think i finally hit my guilt limit though (definitely not my spending or shopping limit), and have now officially opened a savings account which i vow not to pull money out of except for two things: 1) emergencies (let's hope there aren't any), and 2) trips out of the U.S. - hopefully in the not so distant future. i'm much better about managing my money if i have definitive and separate places to put it. having all my extra money just sitting in my checking account since i paid off my debt has not been a good thing. it just gets spent. it's a small thing and probably not newsworthy (whoohoo! i got a savings account! like...duh.), but it's a big step in the direction i want to go.

 

i was puzzled by why my checking account balance was so much higher than i expected it to be the other day at the ATM, but now i just checked my account online and see that it was because i got my $600 "stimulus check" as an automatic deposit on tuesday.

like many other americans, i'll be using it to pay for things i already bought. so.... whoooo. i guess.

 

it's hot outside.

it figures that on bike to work day (and this season's first spare the air day) it would be almost 100 degrees. when they said it would break 100 in the east bay, i thought they meant the EAST east bay - over there on the other side of the hills where it breaks 100 all the time in the summer. not here. i was totally sweaty by the time i got to work this morning (4+ miles through west oakland, eville, and west berkeley). plus, it's super windy and i had a horrible headwind riding in. however, given that it may well be the most beautiful day we get this year (since SF is generally cold and foggy in the summertime), biking to work provided a good chance to be outside before getting to the office. now if i can just leave a little early to get some of that sun!

also, it's really fucking stupid that BART still doesn't allow bikes on trains during peak commute hours, EVEN AS THEY ARE PROMOTING BIKE TO WORK DAY. i know a good number of people who drive to work instead of taking the train because their offices aren't within walking distance of the train stations. however, they are within biking distance, but unless you can adjust your schedule to get to work later than everyone else, you can't bike commute because they won't let you bring your bike on the train until everyone else is already at work. apparently, BART thinks it would be "too difficult" to add bike cars. come on - it's not rocket science, people. that's what i mean about wishing this city was more bike friendly.

 

i've already shared them over there on the left in my google reader feed, but i wanted to point out a few articles of interest in the current East Bay Express:

first, a lot of people have been ending up on this blog looking for the lyrics to "you ain't artsier than me" by the Grouch because i posted some of them in this post about edIT's album released last fall that includes a remix of the song.

this EBX article gives a bit of history and background to this bay area native, and reveals that he's not really that much of a hater. or a grouch:

Anti-Artsy Emcee

He explains that the song is set up as a parody, and the video is actually a pastiche of images borrowed from other people's videos: ink blots from Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy," hand gestures from a Hewlett Packard commercial, silhouettes from an ad for iPods. In describing the video, Grouch is pretty open and unapologetic about his intent: The concept behind it, he said, "was that we were stealing from other people's artsy campaigns that they had already put out."

CocaineBlunts.com blogger Noz suggested that the song is actually a diss on Grouch's fanbase — a claim Grouch resolutely denies, though it has gained currency in the blogosphere. He said it's mostly about being an anti-elitist: the guy in the hip-hop scene who's not boasting about how he has the flyest clothes and the rarest records; the guy in the hippie scene who's not trying to front like a baller just because he ate brown rice and salad for lunch today.

Grouch takes the Barack Obama gambit in this album, emphasizing personal stories, ranting against elitism, and gabbing about life in the domestic sphere...

if you want to watch the video, it's here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCHV2I_Xog0



then, there's this interesting piece about Ariel Schrag, now known as one of the writers of The L Word but first famous at Berkeley High for self-publishing comic books about the awkwardness of being a teenager that she sold to her classmates:

Top Spy at Berkeley High

She wrote Awkward during the summer after her freshman year, cribbing it partly from sketchbooks she filled with cartoon depictions of stupid high school exploits (like spray-painting with boys or stealing yogurt pretzels from a store and getting chewed out by the cashier). "My brain sort of naturally did the perfect amount of editing, in terms of remembering what was interesting and forgetting what wasn't," Schrag said. Awkward is the most primitive of her comics, though it's still a thoroughly entertaining read, filled with a fourteen-year-old's chatty stories about her crush on actress Juliette Lewis, and the best guy friend who became a pseudo boyfriend, but not really...

Schrag finished Awkward before tenth grade and sold copies for five bucks a pop. By the time she started school in the fall, she was a minor campus celebrity.



and finally, a sad but revealing article on the recent demise of The Rockridge Institute, a thinktank co-founded by well-known linguist George Lakoff formed to focus on pushing the progressive movement forward. mostly interesting because 1) i'm working for a similar thinktank, and the lessons learned here about funding and image apply to many small progressive organizations, whether NGOs or not, and 2) the idea of 'framing' is something that we do a lot of in my environmental public policy work, and one around which me and my colleague formed an "environmental salon" in 2005; the shorthand for the name of the group was "enviro-framers", inspired by Lakoff's book, Don't Think of an Elephant.

Framing Issues Is Hard; Just Ask George Lakoff

Because Lakoff's best-selling book had received such acclaim, everyone assumed Rockridge was flush with cash. "People thought that they should just get stuff from us for free," said Joe Brewer, a fellow who wrote about environmental policy. He said advocacy groups would approach Rockridge talking excitedly about how they could use the institute's resources; when they heard there was a price tag attached, "they just turned off," Brewer said.

In fact, Rockridge suffered from the same fund-raising issues that plague all progressive organizations, where funding is often doled out in dribs and drabs for small, specific projects. Conservatives don't have that problem, Brewer said. "The Cato Institute will get a million dollars a year for five years, and the donor will say, 'Do whatever you need to do to reach your goals,'" he said. Whereas in the progressive world, it's more like: "Here's $20,000 and we're going to watch how you spend every penny, and no you're not going to get any more," he said.

...Brewer and his colleague Eric Haas both say that the group realized six months ago that "framing" was the wrong word for its focus. Too many people took that word to mean that the Rockridge Institute worked on spin, propaganda, and messaging, and that it wanted to slap some new labels on candidates and policy proposals to trick the public into supporting them. A review of Lakoff's best-seller in The Atlantic called framing "psychobabble," and Democratic Congressman Rahm Emanuel devoted a section of his own book to bashing Lakoff, saying that Lakoff is "flat-out wrong" to think that Democrats can win campaigns through word games.

cognitive framing and linguistics are something we spend a lot of time on in the public policy field, as the words used to describe an issue have so much weight and meaning and greatly affect how people think about and feel about a subject, whether it's immigration or healthcare or the economy or national security, and it's sad that the Rockridge Institute, as the author points out, ironically framed themselves in a way that negatively affected their success.

 

tomorrow, may 15, is Bike To Work Day all around the bay area and San Francisco, and friday, may 16 is NATIONAL bike to work day. if you have a bike, i highly suggest you do it.

i've been biking to work 2 days a week, and as result, have often been biking around after work too, taking my bike into SF from downtown oakland, because going home to get in the car just seems stupid, and i really like the thought of my car sitting without ever being driven once 2/7 days a week. i've really started to enjoy being a bike commuter and bike rider in the city - it took a long time for me not to be terrified of traffic + cement + train rails, but now i'm really into it and plan to start biking to work more than 2 days a week (at least until it starts raining again.) i'm still a little overworried about someone STEALING my bike, as that is unfortunately super common around here.

being in davis last weekend, which is a SUPER bike friendly city with their own traffic signals and everything, made me wish the bay area was more bike-friendly and that bike culture was something that more than just a small percentage of people participate in. it's great exercise, it relieves stress, it's good for the environment, it's CHEAPER, and it's fun. sure, sometimes it's a bit inconvenient (like if you need groceries), but you can ultimately change your life to fit bike living (like buying groceries in smaller quantities from stores closer to you), and i think it's a fun and positive change to make, even if it's just a couple of days a week.

 

http://www.peterrussell.com/Odds/VirtualAge.php

my biological age is 31
my virtual age is 10.5

average life expectancy is 74
my life expectancy is 94.5

it would've been longer if i'd eat breakfast and exercise more often. and stop jumping out of planes. ;)

while i'm sure it's not at all accurate, it's an interesting experiment in relative effects - seeing the life expectancy go up and down according to certain factors was a bit unnerving, as while i'm healthier than most, i'm definitely not as healthy as i could be and do skimp on things like regular meals and regular exercise.

 

in my line of work, there are a lot of acronyms. acronyms for projects, for agencies and organizations, for species, for work tools, for groups, for research, everything. in the social world there are also a lot of acronyms, and now with people writing in txt shorthand all over the place sometimes it's impossible to tell what's an acronym and what's just a word without vowels.

there are a lot of words in general use out there that most people don't even realize are acronyms, like "SCUBA". and YUPPIE. oh, the yuppie. how much i try to avoid fitting into that acronym. here in SF we also have "yippies" = yuppie hippies, or white collar hippies (they're richer and smell better. they own hybrids and spend thousands on solar electricity for their houses and yoga retreats and eco-vacations, etc.) i think most of my friends (and many of my coworkers) almost qualify as yippies. afterall, we're young, urban, often-professional with disposable incomes, and semi-hippie in that most of us have a sustainability bent. but for some people, the connotation/connection to the word yuppie is too strong, and many of us are artists, not "professionals".

so, avoiding the "yuppie" link and focusing explicitly on Gens X and Y and dot-com era 30somethings, a new acronym has been created for this group of young wealthy people who care about the environment: YAWNs - Young and Wealthy but Normal:

They drive hybrid cars, if they drive at all, shop at local stores, if they shop at all, and pay off their credit cards every month, if they use them at all.

They may have disposable income, but whatever they make, they live below their means in a conscious effort to tread lightly on the earth.

They are a new breed of Gen Xers and Y's, Young and Wealthy but Normal, or Yawns.

this acronym has a lot of issues. first, obvi, is the phonetic. YAWN!? secondly, what does "normal' mean here? not paris hilton? because "normal" in most parts of the country does not = eco-conscious and living below your means. even in SF, where many of these YAWN types live, the young and wealthy are often concentrated in the Marina district, which although it does have a lot of yoga studios and organic coffee shops, is not what i would call a hotbed of sustainable living philosophies and is what is normal there is what is normal elsewhere: affluenza. my point is that sustainable living isn't "normal" almost anywhere - although it's on the rise among affluent types, yes (and greenwashing has made some people think they're living sustainably when they're NOT), it's not "normal" in a general population context - and i'm finding this "wealthy BUT normal" phrasing really odd.

i love sociology, and i love demographics and statistics (which is why my current internship @ american environics has been very interesting), but i hate that the tendency is to recognize loose patterns as definitive categories instead of as points on a spectrum. the YAWN label is ill-fitted, and i don't think going to stick.

arduous sustainability blog agrees and offers an alternative acronym: Apples! APLS: Affluent Persons Living Sustainably (nothing that affluence is relative).

buzzfeed has more links.

 

speaking of fashion for living life, my friend domini the clothing architect is featured in this NYT article about Style Wars, a unique fashion design event held in NYC last weekend that forces designers to create outfits out of scrap in 4.5 minutes:

A red-haired artist and designer known only as Domini, a wildcard entrant who had lost the San Francisco and Los Angeles competitions but was brought back for the finals because of her enthusiasm, seemed to be the underdog...

...Karelle Levy, a Miami-based designer and performance artist, slashed into her multicolored knit jumpsuit for strips of fabric, while throwing a hot pink shawl over a skirt of bubble packaging she had spun around a model’s waist and legs. Domini used badminton rackets covered in T-shirts as wings for one outfit and turned an old suit jacket into a pair of jodhpurs by having the model put her legs into the arms.

Art of Shade used a Chinese lantern to create a skirt festooned with white flower-shaped lights and white wallpaper. One judge said the outfit was more “Home Depot than fashion.”

Domini made it to the final round, but lost to Ms. Levy, who, working to the theme of “Wed or Dead,” used sheets of X-ray film as a top, strategically placed cotton pads on the model’s hair bun and high heels, and turned surgical gloves into a large flowerlike shoulder appliqué in what proved to be an innovative use of medical supplies.

domini is certainly one of THE most enthusiastic people i know. about everything. keeping up in a conversation with her is difficult. she spews more ideas every 30 seconds than most people have in a week. congratulations to her for making it to the final round - next time i bet she won't be the underdog.

photos here!

 

Your life is an occasion. Dress for it.


inspired by: mr. magorium

i will most certainly use this to punctuate something.

 

stop trying to be cool and instead try to be great.