Limeades for Learning

During September, Sonic was running a (heavily advertised) promotion for one of my favorite charities, Donors Choose. As you may recall, goal 16 is to donate at least $500.50 to classrooms in need through the site. Two weekends ago, when my family went golfing, we stopped at Sonic for breakfast, and everyone graciously gave me their Limeades for Learning codes. I thought it was a matching thing, so I wanted to wait until pay day to use them, but it turned out you use the codes to vote for your favorite projects and Sonic will choose the projects with the most votes that total half a million dollars and, you know, fund them. Still pretty cool.

So I used my four codes on projects that were lower down in the running, just to make the teachers feel like someone was actually paying attention to their proposals and thought they had good ideas. Then, while I was looking at a map of Yugoslavia on wikipedia to make sure I have the order of the countries down for the one-week-away-FSOT (Slovenia Croatia Bos/Hertz Serbia Montenegro Macedonia boom. Got it.), I remembered reading about the war in Bosnia (capital Sarajevo) and the genocide in Rwanda (capital Kigali) in Scholastic News. Weighty subjects for second-graders, to be sure, but those were the stories that stuck. All the rest have faded into a nebulous feeling of "Oh, I enjoyed reading Scholastic News," but Rwanda and Bosnia have stayed because they were powerful. I'm sure the magazine wouldn't have detailed the exact techniques being used, but I remembered feeling like I wasn't being talked down to about it; it felt really empowering that my teacher trusted me to be mature enough to read about a real-life war happening now, at a time when I was still supposed to want to play with my Barbies when I got home from school.

I'm hoping the magazine has maintained that integrity, because I donated to one proposal to bring Scholastic News into another second grade classroom today. JP Morgan Chase had already donated the first $400 of the project's needed $457.94, and as much as I would have liked to put in the whole last bit, I really need to take care of my credit bill first. I donated $25, figuring the remaining $33 would be an easy enough donation for someone else to make. Turns out, JPMC came back to finish funding the project (which also was for a school-year subscription to Time Kids)! I think it's interesting that everyone's all on about the taxpayer's bail-out money going to outrageous corporate bonuses - and I'm aware that donations like this are probably made in the interest of being a combination tax write-off/PR scheme - but the fact remains that some kids somewhere are being helped by this act. And hey, they could be keeping all the money for themselves.

Scholastic News being my pet project, I didn't actually donate to the ones I voted for Sonic to fund - yet. I'll reevaluate my finances in a week or two. In the meantime, here are the links:

Learning in a flash! asks for 30 2GB flashdrives to help students transport their work from the school computer lab to the classroom to home. As we all know, the price of memory has come down A LOT since I was in school (and paid $50 for my quarter-gig drive and another $50 for the eighth-of-a-gig SD card for my camera), so this whole project costs just $240 plus the site fees.

Meanwhile, this school newspaper needs new supplies. Journalism is a new elective in this New York City school, one that, like No Child Left Behind before it, is drastically underfunded. While I think that three laptops is maybe more than the bare minimum necessary for this project, I respect the teacher who wrote this proposal for choosing devices that are actually really economical and journalism textbooks to help enrich the kids' experience. At $70 a pop, it's no wonder the school couldn't afford to buy these! The whole cost to fund an entire journalism course - with materials that can surely be used for at least a few years to come - is only $2320... someone remind me why we're in Iraq again?

Everything I know about India, I learned by reading Salman Rushdie. Okay. Maybe that's an overstatement... but I definitely learned everything I know about Antigua from Jamaica Kincaid. Point is, books that introduce you to foreign cultures, historic landmarks, and inspire you to love reading for its own sake are awesome. Thus, my most-likely next donation candidate is "Solve a Mystery, Learn some History," which is asking for 31 titles of an acclaimed 5th-grade-level series of mystery books that introduce their readers to things and places as varied as the US Constitution and the Acropolis in Athens. The best part? Most of the books cost less than $7.50 each, so the entire proposal can be filled with $312, $125 of which has already been contributed.

Finally, I chose this bookshelf proposal, because. I mean. The kids don't have a BOOKSHELF in their classroom. Enough said.
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Tallies

I realized this weekend that I have a lot of goals that have cumulative totals - donate this much money, swing on this many swingsets, you know - and that, rather than cluttering up the Master List with all of their progress tallies, I should create a separate post where they can all aspire to be completed together, as one big happy family. I have been updating the "Charity" post every night this week after I finish with my Free Rice learnin', and I will continue to do that in addition to this new post. This post, however, has the advantage of being privileged enough to get a coveted spot in the prestigious and exclusive Quick Links sidebar.

And remember! This is not a complete list of goals in progress, just those that have specific tallies associated with them. You can always see all of the officially In Progress goals by viewing the master list and seeking out the terra cotta colored goals, or get more detailed progress reports by clicking the "In Progress" tag on the sidebar.



4. Discover AND LIKE 101 new bands or solo artists.

New artists approved of: 7

12. Rosetta Stone: Spanish

Lessons completed through: Level 2, Unit 1, Lesson 3

16. Donate at least $500.50 on Donors Choose.

Amount donated: $100.00

23. Visit at least 25 cathedrals.

Cathedrals admired: 1

24. Swing on 101 unique swingsets.

Swingsets swung: 8

38. Volunteer at least 101 hours with Habitat for Humanity.

Hours completed: 4

44. Raise $500.50 by doing Walks for the Cure.

Amount donated: $23.00

54. Finish the Discworld series.

Books read: 5

55. (re)Read the complete works of Tennessee Williams.

Plays read: 0.66

58. Read the complete works of Salman Rushdie.

Rushdies read: 1

59. Read every book on the shelf that has not yet been so.

Backlog finished: 3

68. Loan $101 on Kiva; recycle all repayments.

Loaned out: $25 Recycled: $0

70. Achieve 500,000 grains of rice on Free Rice for Spanish vocabulary.

Grains donated: 2500

71. Achieve 500,000 grains of rice in all other subjects.

Grains donated: 14790

73. Write 101 letters to Washington.

Complaints lodged: 4

78. Accumulate 101 postcards.

Postcards owned: 25

84. Go to ten special exhibitions at museums.

Exhibitions visited: 1

85. Read ten books that are recommended to me.

Recommended reading completed: 2

86. Watch 25 of the Greatest Movies of All Time Ever that I've never before seen.

Movies Consumed: 2

93. Learn to identify at least ten things under the hood of a car and how you can tell when they break.

Car Parts Understood: 0.2 (Yeah zero point two, I know an engine when I see it.)
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A Secret

While I am fairly confident that I could label a map of Africa with all the correct country names, I was really bad about learning their capitals. Same for the islands of the South Pacific, and, to a lesser extent, those of the Caribbean, but in every region, I knew at least the major ones. I have been playing Free Rice for the last 45 minutes or so trying to remedy this, and earned 4030 grains of rice and developed a few mnemonics for remembering which capital goes with which country - at least when the names of the capital are provided and I don't have to recall them straight from memory. I'm hoping that by doing this every day for the next week, at least 2500 grains, I'll be able to reinforce the names even more. Just to confirm my basic geography skills, I'll also sprinkle in some of the "Countries on the map" game, too.

I also realized I should probably get a (re)start on Rosetta Stone Spanish, so my goal for this week is to try and do at least half an hour of it every morning before work. I find that scheduling things to do before work instead of before bed makes me much more apt to do them - partially because it gives me a nice excuse to delay heading over to the office, and partially because I'd just rather go to sleep at night. I'm also trying hard not to overschedule myself, but it's very difficult. Forty hours a week at work is a lot of time, something I know shouldn't be a huge surprise to me, nor something that I let get in the way of me doing what I want to do. Especially when the real reason is TV. Anyway, that's my plan for this week. I'll keep you posted on how that actually goes.
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No, it's totally safe.

The reason this week's SPT is being posted on Saturday is that the last three nights, I have been completely exhausted from work and after-work activities; by the time I get settled in at night, I practically fall right asleep. And I don't really feel the need to apologize to the internet for being out in the world. So my SPT this week comes from one such adventure that occurred on Thursday night with my oldest, dearest friend, Michelle, during which I discovered a few interesting new things about riverfront Daytona, discovered I am good at darts (before I start in on my second double), and began goal 24, Swing on 101 unique swingsets, at my favorite childhood park, the Magic Forest. No pictures yet, even though I obviously had my camera with me that night, but I'll get one soon. This playground is the bomb-diggity, yo.

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Postcards - the beginning.

(Sort of) as promised, here are 15 of my original 17 postcards.

1. Edgar Degas, "Two Dancers on a Stage," The Courtauld Gallery, London.

2. James A. M. Whistler, "Girl with Almond Blossom," The Courtauld Gallery, London.

3. Henri Reignault, "Salome," The Met, New York.

4. John Singer Sargent, "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose," Tate Britain, London.

5. Paul Delaroche, Detail from "The Execution of Lady Jane Grey," National Gallery, London.

6. Detail of Mosaic, St Paul's Cathedral, London.

7. Camille Pissarro, "The Boulevard Montmarte on a Winter Morning," The Met, New York.

8. Detail of Mosaic, St Paul's Cathedral, London.

9. Pierre-August Renoir, "Madame Marguerite-Louise Lemonnier and Her Children," The Met, New York.

10. Pablo Picasso, "Girl with Mandolin," Museum of Modern Art, New York.

11. Georges Seurat, Study for "Le Chahut," Courtauld Gallery, London.

12. Pierre-August Renoir, "At the Theatre (La Première Sortie)," National Gallery, London.

13. Edgar Degas, "After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself," National Gallery, London.

14. Georges Seurat, "Young Woman Powdering Herself," Courtauld Gallery, London.

15. Francisco de Goya, "Doña Isabel de Porcel," National Gallery, London.

The other two are not on the wall (for symmetry reasons) and I don't have any pictures of them yet. They're really awesome, post-apocalyptic paintings commissioned for St. Paul's Cathedral in London earlier this decade. They were first hung, I think, right after the mosaics were given their first thorough cleaning in at least a century, and although I don't normally enjoy paintings that depict Christ, I find this pair to be fascinating, especially their very-intentional juxtaposition with the brightly gilded mosaics. I plan on scanning them at work tomorrow so I can show them off, too :)
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On a Streetcar Named Getting-My-Ass-In-Gear

For the first time, I feel really good looking back at the progress I've made in the last week. It might be because I got paid and so everything just looks a little cheerier, but it just seems like I've gotten over some kind of hump (or maybe just my plague) and am better equipped to listen when I tell myself to turn off the TV and do something else. In fact, on Thursday night I was too good at that and missed half of the Bill Clinton interview on The Daily Show - even though I had set up a reminder and the cable box had switched itself over to the channel. But the reason I missed it was that I was so engrossed in my Adaptation project, and the interview is online, so I don't feel horrible about it. I think this week I am actually going to write a scene, instead of just taking endless notes. Three or four possible ideas for an opening scene have been fighting to claw their way out onto the pixel-page, so I might just do all of them and see where it goes.

I read almost all the articles I meant to, which can be read about in the post below this one, and I finished Sourcery, the first next Discworld novel on the list. I also began Streetcar on Saturday morning and got about halfway through it. If you've never read the introduction that Tennessee Williams wrote himself for it, you can download it from me here. I would pull out one of my favorite quotes, but 1) I don't have just one, and 2) I can't bear to rip any of them out of context. They're all better together. Suffice it to say that reading it, and then lovingly transcribing it because it seems not to exist ANYWHERE ELSE on the internet, I was reinvigorated about both this project and the general direction I want to take my life.

Speaking of which, the Foreign Service test is just a little over two weeks away. It's intimidating. There's this huge, seemingly-singular event in my too-near future and it. It seems like applying to Vassar all over again. I have my sights set on this one thing, to the point of totally blocking out any other potentiality, and I'm not sure how many more times this is going to work for me. To that end, I've begun to think about how else I might leave Daytona in next spring or summer. It's actually not as hard as I thought it would be to do this... I imagined that planning alternatives might feel like a concession of defeat before I'd even given myself a chance to see what I could do. Instead, although I'm still dealing with those feelings, I also feel more confident in myself, and sort of feel resourceful for the first time in my life.

Besides wanting to be a career diplomat, one of my other long-standing career dreams has been to be an editor at a publishing company. I don't just love grammar, I have a sort of unnatural eagle-eye for spotting errors and typos (think an extra space between words) at a glance. Unfortunately for this particular dream - though greatly to my credit for the State Department, obviously - I majored in Political Science, not English, so I'm not immediately qualified, on paper, to get a job in publishing. I do, however, have a bit of practical experience editing manuscripts, papers, and, recently, business reports.

Enough experience, I think, to post a craiglist ad in the major cities advertising my availability for freelance editing services. This idea is still in its infancy, but hopefully, if I can get this venture up and running by the beginning of November, and people are into it, I'll be able to have at least six months of experience to put on my resume and a list of references to vouch for my abilities. If it doesn't work out with the State Department, I can still move back up north (or west, or somewhere completely off my radar right now) and apply for real editing gigs and do something (else) that I love with my life.

So there's that. Another thing I love is books. (Yeah, completely and unartfully changing gears here). On Friday afternoon, my brother and his girlfriend flew into town and I left work early to hang out with them, and discovered that Kristen really likes books, too, and that, furthermore, my brother had never heard of Mandala, my very favorite used bookstore... possibly ever. So we turned right back around after we got home and headed down once more to "Daytona proper" and spent a good two hours rummaging through the overcrowded shelves and floor-stacks and old National Geographics and Playboys. I ended up with three new Philip Roth books; The Satanic Verses; a book called Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz, one of the fathers of the modern Arabic novel; Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man; and a National Geographic from 1975 revealing the amazing future of wind power (including a really excellent artist's rendering of a futuristic, multiturbine, exceptionally top-heavy oceanic device, which, thanks to the power of the interweben, I need not scan because some kindly person has already done it for me. The picture will be below the cut, along with my final purchases, four new postcards! I'm really excited about them and I can't really remember this second if I made any more good goal progress this week - rode the bike to work on two days last week? Stretching regularly every night? - so I'm just going to skip right to the pictures :)



First, the windpower of the future!, as envisioned by National Geographic in, once again, 1975.

I know, right? Craaaazy hippies. What were they thinking?

Now, postcards. Tomorrow I plan on sharing the 17 postcards I already have, but first up tonight is Gustav Klimt's "Cartoon for the Stoclet Palace: Expectation." Secret: I really love the Klimt aesthetic but my inner indie snob has always prevented me from buying a poster of "The Kiss," because everyone else has it. What I enjoy most about "Expectation" is the way the woman's body is facing left, but her head is turned back. What is she looking at? A man? A mirror? A squirrel? The world may never know.

Next, the Monets.

This "Japanese Bridge" lives in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, according to the back of the postcard, and is the much warmer, more vibrant brother of the painting I've seen a few times at the National Gallery in London, and I like it more, I think. I'm a huge sucker for the interplay of the full spectrum of colors.

The second Monet is "Venice, Palazzo Dario," which feels cool and refreshing to look at, with all that bright-blue water. I don't really remember seeing any Venice paintings by Monet before, but the fuzzy detailing in the water really drew me into it. If I have to pick only one city in Europe to go to to satisfy my travel goal for the list, I think it has to be Venice. What with the whole sinking thing (even though that may not be true anymore), it seems rather urgent that I get there as soon as possible. Maybe I'm just in the mood for delicately ornate architecture right now. Who knows.

And the parting shot is Renoir's "La Déjeuner des canotiers," or, "The Luncheon of the Boating Party," for the more English-inclined. Not going to lie, I am a bigger fan of Renoir's ballerinas (second only to those by Degas), but I bought this postcard because of Amélie, one of my favorite movies of all-time-ever. If you've seen it, you know it features semi-prominently in the film, with Amélie playing a semi-metaphorical Girl-with-Drinking-Glass. It's one of those beautifully complex paintings of people that I love, where every person is their own character, and you can tell just by the way Renoir has painted their faces that they all have a unique backstory and set of motivations that make them more enduring than just the luncheon scene itself.

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Missing a New Yorker piece...

But otherwise, I got in the full count of articles for the week. (Actually had a lot more in The Economist, because I have real-life physical copies of it now, but it's been a busy weekend so I only had time to write blurbs for the first three that I read.) My weekly update post will be made sometime tomorrow, due to the same busy weekend. I actually got a lot done! (And yet, so very little...)


"Time Square vs. The High Line" contrasts and compares the new pedestrian-plazafication of Times Square with the opening of the High Line, a park created on a stretch of abandoned elevated rail tracks. Interesting to think about the new standards of "public spaces" in American society - one in the midst of one of America's most famous consumer hotspots, and the other offering prime views into other people's houses; be sure to note the part about the cabaret someone set up on their fire escape nearby.

"Happy Feet" is a cute little fluff piece about Zappos.com. When I clicked it, the leader made me think it was going to be so much more - an in-depth analysis of the American sense of entitlement to shoe collections of Imelda Marcosesque proportions. Instead, the article reveals the interesting corporate philosophy that enabled Zappos to grow so popular so quickly - and, like YouTube to Google, so powerful a competitor that they simply had to be purchased. Still worth the read, though.

"Unnatural selection" is yet another of those first-anniversary-of-the-market-crashing pieces that every media outlet in the world is doing this week. Obviously, though, since this one is by The Economist, it's one of the ones you should definitely take a look at if you're into this sort of thing. Notable sections include: why allowing Lehman to fail was a (kind of) good decision; how to get the message out to banks that the government won't be so generous next time in bailing them out; and why "bonuses are the symptom not the disease." If for no other reason, you should click on this article just to see the awesome carousel graphic which was also the cover of this week's issue.

Breaking news: Moon is coldest known place in the solar system. Sorry, Pluto. Tough toenails.

"Why are we the naked ape?" is a short history of the various theories that have been proposed since Darwin's time to explain why humans are significantly less hairy than the other primates. The theories are all very interesting, and the way in which scientists are currently making headway on this question may unpleasantly surprise you.

So now the robots can ask us for help about how best to map our world conquer all the humans. Hooray!

"Re-rigging Hamid Karzai" describes the... awkward state of Afghani democratic practices. This sentence sums it up best: "The tragedy is that he would probably have won a clean vote: he is still the closest thing Afghanistan has to a national leader."

And finally, "Will Russia and China pitch in?" is, on the surface, about why America and Western Europe need Russia and China's firm support on the UN Security Council to keep Iran's nuclear warhead program from advancing any further, it's also about the deeper issue of that for the last few (or five) decades, Americans have believed they can dictate the world's foreign policy and, now, when we need assistance in preventing a nation we've made loathe our government from attaining weapons to hurt us, the allies we need are nations we've alienated in the past. We never learn to just stop messing with things. Eloquent, I know, but it's 12:30 in the morning and I'm about to head to bed.
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My enduring love of macros...

...requires that I use a paintbrush and not the text tool.

Or, this week's SPT post contains two bonus pictures to show you my workspace!

That is all.




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$1, Bob, $1.

Today I donated my first dollar towards my breast cancer charity goal. Technically it wasn't by doing a sanctioned Walk for the Cure (in fact, I didn't even walk at all except from the car into the restaurant and back), but it's still going to cancer research. I decided to get lunch today at Firehouse Subs and they had a donation box set out for the American Cancer Society. Since I cashed my first full-time paycheck (ever!) yesterday, and proceeded to buy myself two bottles of celebratory wine to commence the wine connoisseur goal, number 53, it seemed like a good idea to also give something back.

I've tried to do this sort of thing periodically from time to time; after a big shopping splurge in New York, I'd keep change in my pocket to give to a homeless person. Most memorably, I gave all the change in my wallet (except for enough quarters for emergency bus fare) to a homeless man in Portland after buying a $2 truffle.

In other, mid-week news, I've commenced goal #93, Learn to identify ten things under the hood of a car and how to tell when they break, thanks to a Facebook quiz to that effect. I got 40% right, but the only one I knew for sure was that a muffler is on the exhaust pipe. Anyways now that I have a car, I'm sure at some point someone will be able to help me identify things that can go horribly, horribly wrong under there, and I'll never want to drive again...

I just went downstairs to get the mail and! I'm glad I hadn't hit post yet. The Economist came! Hooray! I'm reading through "The world this week" right now (in between tasks, of course!), which certainly won't be posted as one of the three articles, never fear. It looks like there's a lot of juicy stuff about Obama and health care, British foreign policy, and, of course, the cover story, "Wall Street: One year on, what's changed?" I am so very, very, very excited to finally have a subscription!
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Sicko.

It's been a long, hard week. I've had trouble sleeping, I've gotten a sore throat, I've gotten a non-fever fever, and a cough of painfully epic proportions. I didn't go to work until noon on Tuesday, and I left at 1:30 on Friday. I have been on the couch or in bed almost all of the rest of the time. Blah.

I did do SPT, and make a little progress on various goals, and I will be posting links to and short blurbs about the articles I've been reading below. I cut because I care :)


First, the picture:

This was taken outside my office building after work, and that redness about the face is the fever. It's definitely not the best picture out there of me, but it's probably not the worst, either.

Next, I checked out the next two Discworld novels from the library when I went to stock up on sicky TV to watch (Stargate SG-1 from the beginning and The Duchess, for those interested in such trivial details). I plan to finish Sourcery tomorrow and get started on Wyrd Sisters shortly thereafter. I want to keep a steady stream of these coming in; they're good bedtime stories.

I've written another Drabble that I'm not yet ready to share. Maybe tomorrow. We'll see.

Adaptation is going slowly, but steadily. Well, more slowly than steadily, to be honest, but I'm blaming the sick. Very soon I'm going to stop blaming, I swear, but I've been making very solid notes and cross-referencing and getting some ideas together about the best way to tell this very long and convoluted story.

I obviously haven't ridden the bike to work this week, since I don't want to go into cardiac arrest from lack of oxygen or anything. But, I did find the handweight that I'd stashed in my room a while back to use while I watch TV, and I started stretching a little bit and doing leg lifts and crunches more regularly. I haven't explicitly tried to do a split since the gym in Portland, but I'm sure I'll actually get to that fairly soon.

I scheduled the Foreign Service Officer Test! It's on Wednesday, October 7th, and I have to drive to Orlando for it but that's okay. Within three weeks of the test, I'll get scores back and find out if I've been invited to write the five "personal narratives" about my life experiences that I feel qualify me to do the work of the State Department. I believe that about three weeks after that, I will find out if I've been invited for an interview, which they call an All Day Oral Assessment. Intimidating, I know. If they decide they like me after that, between two and twenty-four months later I will be offered a position. So. That's the process in a nutshell. Please, please continue to keep your fingers crossed for me!

And, finally, the articles. You'd think that with all this downtime, I'd have done almost nothing else, but my sick is the sick of ache and muscle exhaustion. Half the time I've been watching TV, my computer has been closed. Closed. That is so incredibly weird for me, because usually TV is in no way stimulating enough to occupy my full attention. Anyway, the last two weeks' worth of articles that I have read are:

• "Kennedycare" is a really excellent summary of Ted Kennedy's decades-long fight for better health care and coverage for Americans, Reagan and Nixon's creation of the "socialist Trojan horse" defense, and how all of this history is affecting Obama and how the best legacy he (and Kennedy) can leave is to "shift the trajectory of American politics."



• "The Rubber Room" was another excellently informative article, though this one is about something I'm sure very few of us are aware of: the hundreds of teachers employed by the New York City Schools who are paid for years to sit in these holding tanks called "Rubber Rooms" because they've been accused of misconduct or incompetency in the classroom. The reason the city is forced to continue paying their salaries (including full benefits and pension contributions) is the contract with the Teachers Union - it mandates arbitration to resolve these charges, and it can take years for a particular teacher's turn to come because the hearings for one person can go on for months. The article is fairly long because it details three of these cases, but I really recommend you read it, especially if you're a New Yorker yourself.



• "The Fountain House"I'm reading three articles a week in The New Yorker. You knew one of them was going to be fiction. It had to happen. I can't really say anything about this story that won't give part of it away, but it was just really sweet and it made me smile to read it.



• "The Vote that Changed Japan" is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: a description of the recent election that saw the first solid defeat of the party that had controlled the country since the 60s and what that means for the country's future. If you have no idea what I just said, that's all the more reason for you to check this one out.



• "Pain-free animals?" will tell you everything you need to know about the next possible breakthrough in food production: animals genetically engineered to not feel pain, as such, so that killing them for food will be more humane. This article did more than Fastfood Nation could to make me seriously contemplate the ethics of my carnivorism. In the end, though, I reached the same conclusion I always do: chic-ken gooooood.



• "The Shrinking Archipelago" will remind you about the disproportionately devastating effects global weirding (bonus link yay!) has on developing nations. In the case of Indonesia, climate change will not only cause hundreds of smaller islands to be completely submerged in the next half-century; Indonesia is one of the leaders in deforestation (along with Brazil) because of Western demand for palm oil and other cash crops that Indonesians are increasingly opting to grow.



• "HIV's Weak Spot" summarizes the findings of a new study which shows that the HIV virus literally has a weak spot in its structure - a place where antibodies may actually be able to attach if they're taught to look for it, ie, through vaccination. Read, learn, love.



• After reading the previous article, I felt a little behind on the history of the search for an HIV vaccine. Luckily, New Scientist provided a convenient link in the last paragraph of that article, so if you're a clickaholic like me and have already read it, you can skip this one. If not, "Fears over HIV vaccines laid to rest" will tell you briefly about previous efforts to create a vaccine for HIV, why those efforts failed, and why the mere existence of an HIV vaccine was maligned!



• Finally, "Strife in Yemen" is a short piece about latest mid-East hotspot and the civil war currently being waged between the government and a wealthy tribal family and their supporters. Apparently Yemenis really miss monarchy.

For those keeping score, that works out to two in The Economist (first subscription issue should be arriving next week!), three in New Scientist (plus one science article in the Guardian about Alzheimer's and one in the NYT about the food industry battling the health care bill), and four in The New Yorker (subscription starting next week). Behind, yes. But these articles were a great start and I'm really excited to start reading the magazines all the way through. Next week, I hope to have this goal more complete by Friday, so it doesn't get folded into the Weekly Update again.

So that's where I stand right now. I'm still working on cleaning up my room and going through my boxed stuff, but mostly I'm just tired ALL THE TIME. Like now. So I'm going to bed. Goodnight!

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Picnic on the beach

In addition to getting an epic sunburn on my shins yesterday afternoon, I completed my first goal: number 82, Have a picnic in a park with at least one good friend and a bottle of wine. What I originally had in mind when I wrote this goal was a shady, grassy knoll in Central Park, with an actual picnic basket and wine glasses. But my friend Katelyn was home from school for the weekend, and asked if I wanted to picnic on the beach with her, and it was great.

We had sandwiches, oranges, and cupcakes, and, of course, wine (albeit in solo cups, because it's technically illegal to drink on the beach here). It was fabulous. The sun was slightly blistering, but there was a constant, cool(ish) breeze blowing in and - the best part - we were far enough north that our little segment of sand wasn't completely packed with holiday weekend tourists (or fellow townies, more likely). We stayed out for a good two hours or so, thus the sunburned shins, catching up and all that jazz.

I'm kind of glad something light and fun like this was the first goal I finished; it's a good precedent to set, a good tone for the whole 1001. Now, to get back to work on those notes for the screenplay...
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Her name is Bea Arthur.

As of today, I officially have nine goals in progress, but this is a lot harder than I thought it would be, what with all the working full time and the moving in and also, sometimes inertia is just inertia.

What has happened since the last weekly update:

• I got a car! It's an '03 Honda Civic EX with sunroof and power everything and I have named her Bea Arthur. Why, you ask? It's fairly simple. We're in Florida, the car is in her golden years, and, of course, she has silver hair paint. We've been together, oh, about a week, now, and we're very happy. I think we're going to be together for a looooong time :)



• I worked a 41 hour work week for the very first time! It's almost like I'm something vaguely resembling a real adult! Almost. Nothing very exciting to report about the office. It's an office, I file, enter data, and fill out forms and generally just learn things about pensions and 401(k)s and that - get this - they are different things. I'm getting paid; hooray.



• I started "training" for my ten minute real-world mile by riding my bike to work on Tuesday (and home on Friday - rain). It's not, you know, hugely excellent training, but it's a start. Hopefully once "autumn" sets in properly and it stops raining every afternoon, this will be a more regular thing and I'll be able to start jogging at night. I definitely want to head over to the middle school nearby and time myself on the track to set a baseline, so I know just how out of shape I am now and precisely how difficult it will be to get down to a ten minute mile. Let me remind you that I can already do this on a treadmill, but the actual physical forward movement of running in the real world makes me lose my breath and get a stitch in my side much more quickly. I hope to do this in the next few weeks, weather-permitting; I'll next update on this once I do get the baseline time.



• I wrote my first fiction drabble two nights ago but I don't think I'm going to post it. I don't think I'm there yet. It feels a little too melodramatic and I'm not completely sure it satisfies the "quality" aspect of that particular goal, but it's only the first week and I haven't done this in a while. I'm sparing you, I promise.



• I was a little sloppy on my article reading goal. I got three done in The New Yorker and two in the Economist (which I also put in a subscription for (signing bonus woo!)), but didn't, um, make it around to the New Scientist at all. Tomorrow I will finish the reading and post all the links and (a short) reaction to each article. Also of note: I plan on getting a subscription to the New Yorker, too, as soon as I get my first paycheck. It's only $70 for two years! I didn't realize it was so cheap! I will definitely read more as soon as I have the actual magazines, and I'm very much looking forward to that.



• Ashamed as I am to admit it, I was also sloppy on starting up Tennessee Williams, Salman Rushdie, and (I feel the worst about this one) the screenplay. With the books, it's partially because I realized around Tuesday or Wednesday that the books were still packed and I really have a lot more to clean up in my room before I get to unloading those six or seven boxes. With the screenplay, though, it's all me and my. Laziness. There, I said it. I have the post-its out, ready to color-code, ready to coordinate with a OneNote Notebook on my computer. I told myself I was waiting until I had the right mechanical pencils on hand, so I could make notes in the book itself, but I bought those on Thursday and still haven't done anything more than think about beginning to read. I honestly can't understand what happened. I was, and am, so excited at the prospect of this undertaking. Maybe that's the problem - I like the idea of starting remaining on the horizon.
  
  Well. No more. I'm running out of excuses (i.e., things to watch on On Demand that aren't Apocalypse Now, by the way) and tomorrow I have An Agenda. I am going to lunch at noonish with an old friend, and when I get home, I am doing a LOT of laundry, and while I am doing laundry, I am going to keep the TV off and the classical/soundtrack music on and start in on this book. I am going to tackle it head on and I am pretty sure that after it gets rolling, the other half of that law of motion (the part about when objects are in motion) will kick right in and it won't seem quite so possibly impossible anymore.



• Attentive readers may have noticed that in the previous post, Sundries - Part 3, one goal had been moved into the "In Progress" category: number 90, Intentionally go out in the pouring rain and soak through. Seems a bit of a one-time thing, doesn't it? Either you've stood out and soaked or you haven't. Not so. Twice in the last two days (that is, last night and this morning) it sounded, in the house, like it was a torrential downpour outside. This morning, it was actually loud enough that it woke me up, and I checked out the window before changing into rain-appropriate attire (that is, not my velvet pajama pants) to ensure that this time, it really was a good solid rain. Literally by the time I was out the door, it still sounded slightly ferocious, kind of like a lion cub on the verge of lion puberty trying out an intimidating roar, and by the time I was across the yard and into the street, the rain felt nice, but I could tell it was definitely not of the "soak through" sort. By the time I was back inside, changing back into my cozy pjs, the rain had slowed to a trickle. The real measure? My shirt was completely dry within five minutes.
  
  Therefore, goal number 90 is in progress because I continue to be vigilant in my search for a proper hard rain and. Seriously. The next time there is one, rain-appropriate attire be damned. I will own that rain, even if it means I have to be ridiculously uncomfortable doing it.
  
  Probably.



• I hit submit. I sort of have a phobia about that, finalizing things that I sometimes don't have complete control over: airplane reservations online, intrawebal submissions of papers, and hitting "send" on just about anything that isn't a casual email. I have a tremendous fear about not being able to take things back. One day I might tell you about the realization of this fear in a funny little story I like to call "Half an hour of tears and screeching with the Virgin Atlantic call center in India." Yeah. It's a good one.
  
  So, what did I submit? The registration packet for the Foreign Service Officer Test. I'm pretty sure it wasn't the entire application, though it did ask for basic resume stuff. I feel like the real application should have essay questions about why I want to be a part of the Foreign Service. I should probably work on preparing those answers, anyway. Yeah. Anyway. The test window is sometime in October, so I should be receiving my invitation to register for a seat sometime in the next week. I'm hoping. Fingers crossed. You should, too.



• Finally, Selfportrait Thursday, goal 37, is underway. You can see it three posts back from here; I will not be mentioning that I have done SPT again in the weekly update unless I'm feeling particularly down about my goal progress that week. It'll sort of be our secret code; you'll know I'm really mad at myself for not getting anything done because I'll bring it up. Know that I am chastising myself quite enough even now, for this grave, underperforming transgression.

So, there it is, the week in review. Now that all the goal detail posts are done, I won't have them as an excuse to delay doing actual goal-related activities, and the posts in the coming week will be far more substantive. I'm going to really get started, I swear!
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Sundries - Part 3

81. Buy something from a local artist.
82. Have a picnic in a park with a bottle of wine and at least one good friend.
87. Complete my 1000 piece Kandinsky puzzle and frame it.
88. Throw a dinner party for at least six people (myself included).
90. Intentionally go out in the pouring rain and soak through.
91. Write down dreams first thing in the morning for two weeks.
96. Go to bed before midnight for one full week.
98. Have at least five indoor plants alive for at least three months all at once.
101. Accumulate $5005 in the Imaginary Fund.

I'm not trying to crap out of finishing the detail posts, but all of these (except for number 101) are legitimately self-explanatory and to write a blurb explaining each of them seems a little ridiculous to me.

Instead, here's the reasoning behind number 101: The Imaginary Fund is something I've thought about creating periodically in the last four years. It's a combination emergency savings account/travel fund/off-limits-until-I'm-grown-up-place-to-stash-some-money. It's called "The Imaginary Fund" because obviously, I don't want to count it in my head with all my other bank accounts. I don't want the money in it to be totaled in, basically; I want to pretend it isn't there at all. When these 1001 days are over, I'll be 25, and I like the idea of giving myself a financial foundation for the future. I would imagine this would go without saying, but I don't plan on exhausting those other accounts to meet this goal - unlike the state of Florida's education/lottery scheme, this money is on top of, not in lieu of, financial security in my checking, savings, and credit accounts.
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Sundries - Part 2

52. See a staged version of Angels in America.
61. Join the Foreign Service OR be taking significant educational steps (ie be in grad school) to do so.
64. Visit Atlantis.
72. Learn the dance from Dirty Dancing.
73. Write 101 letters to Washington.
74. Be a member of the live! studio audience of The Daily Show.
78. Accumulate 101 postcards.
80. Bake my own bread for a month.

Details

52. See a staged version of Angels in America.

It just seemed like the kinda thing a mentally-deranged sex-starved pill-popping housewife would do.

61. Join the Foreign Service OR be taking significant educational steps (ie be in grad school) to do so.

When I was little, I read Goodnight, Moon, and the Berenstein Bears, and, of course, every young girl's favorite, The Hunt for Red October. I wanted to be just like Jack Ryan when I grew up, and married to him, and have like ten thousand of his CIA-trained ass-kicking babies - while still making time for ass-kicking adventures for myself.

The next best thing? The State Department, which will, at the very least, send me abroad for slightly more legal adventures in foreign lands. I'm looking forward to my first hardship post in some tropical developing country, learning a new language and living in a completely new and different culture. I'm looking forward to moving on every three years.

I'll tell the truth. I'm really looking forward to the day when, after a long and faithful career of diplomatic work, I am appointed the Ambassador to the Federated States of Micronesia, where I will work in the embassy on the island of Pohnpei and not, as many people believe, on the isle of Yap.

And also Cuba. I'm hoping that when we reopen proper diplomatic channels with Cuba, I'll be able to go down and be a part of it. It seems rather... well, not glamorous, per se; it's not 1950s Havana or anything that I'm envisioning. I don't know what I'm envisioning, except that I think I really, really need to be there or somewhere similar or anywhere that is not here. More on this theme very shortly.

64. Visit Atlantis.

No, I don't actually think I can find Atlantis, and no, you don't get to know what this goal actually is.

72. Learn the dance from Dirty Dancing.

Um, yes. Just. Yes.

73. Write 101 letters to Washington.

Decisions are made by those who show up.

Complaints lodged: 3

74. Be a member of the live! studio audience of The Daily Show.

Another one of those we-always-talked-about-doing-this-and-never-did-it goals. I love The Daily Show and I will gladly sit outside its studio in New York for six or ten or however many hours, in rain, sleet, or shine, to get tickets. No specific date is set for this attempt, but I'm sure that I will be in New York on some weekday between now and the middle of 2012, so... yeah. Daily Show, woot!

78. Accumulate 101 postcards.

Being a college student, particularly one who moved around as far and as often as I did, it helps to separate one's possessions into those than can be easily and cheaply transported and those that cannot. After you've got your necessary, need-this-to-survive-on-a-daily-basis stuff packed, it feels good to add in some personal effects. My favorite ones are books, but that's not always a practical choice. Posters, too, are good to look at and are generally mobile, but sometimes you really just don't have the space for that tube in your suitcase.

Combine this conundrum with that of how to preserve your memories of your favorite works of art when your camera takes truly terrible pictures with the flash off, and you come out with my postcard collection. Right now, I have about 20 postcards of some of my favorite paintings that I can take with me wherever I go and transform my living space into my home. My goal is to visit enough museums and galleries that I expand this collection to include at least 101 such postcards. Whenever I obtain new ones (they will usually be in batches of between two and five postcards), I'll make a post here with scans of them under the secondary label "Postcards."

Postcards collected: 25

80. Bake my own bread for a month.

First, I should explain why this goal is not listed under creativity with the other "Adventures in Cookery" goals: simply, I already know how to do this. Instead of testing my culinary wits or making me learn a completely new set of recipes, this particular goal is a test of stamina and commitment. I know how to bake bread, rolls, and pastries of most every kind. I know my favorite recipe, a naan recipe that can, with no modification, double as a dinner roll recipe completely by heart. I'm by no means a locavore or invested in any way in the organic foods movement, but I do think it is fun and responsible to do simple things for yourself, especially if you already know how.

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Self-portrait Thursday: 1

Nearly forgot I was supposed to be doing this today! I just set up a google reminder to repeat every Thursday morning to avoid that problem in the future. Also - quick note that Weekly Updates are moving to their regularly scheduled time on Saturday; the first one was on a Friday because it was the first day and I wanted to mark that in some way blah blah blah. Obviously Saturday is the superior choice.

Now, to the first picture!

It's a bit grainy, because I didn't really feel like messing with the settings to get it right without the flash, but I like it anyway. I have a lot of pictures of me in my room from years past, and I think it's only fitting that I capture part of the moving-back-in on (digital) film. What you can't see in this picture is my dresser (conveniently hidden by my head), nor my desk (conveniently off-camera to my left).

Other notes: the stick puppet in the bottom left wearing the green feather mask is Anastasia Romanov. You had to be there.
My bookshelf normally looks like I just won an epic game of Tetris. There are giant gaps right now because I took a lot of things out for the last schoolyear and I don't know which are going back up. Not even sure yet which things there will be staying.
My closet normally looks that messy. Oh well.
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