A Nervous Romance

Oy. I forgot to dropbox the Iceman article files, so I'll have to make the pdf tomorrow. In the meantime, an update of a different sort: I watched Annie Hall on Saturday night, the second of the twenty-five greatest movies of all time ever I have viewed since starting this whole shebang. I loved it. The story was adorable without being fuzzy, the script was hilarious, and the little extra bits Woody Allen threw in, like the animated scene and the subtitled "yes we're talking but we should be fucking" scene, just made it an excellent piece of film work. I also loved how it is obviously one of Jerry Seinfeld's favorite movies, or Larry David's, or both.

Oh! On Friday last week, I donated $25 on Donors Choose to a fourth grade class that needs posterboard and markers to make maps of the US and the world. As you may recall, I am a huge fan of coloring maps in order to internalize geography, and there was some special corporate matching thing going on in honor of President's Day... it was timely. I'm now 10% done with the Donors Choose goal!

I like quantifiable progress. I should actually figure out how many stitches are required when knitting a sweater... if I were to estimate, I'd say I'm about 73% done at this point. Progress has ground to a near-halt because I'm at the cap of the right sleeve, and I knit it in the round so I'm not entirely sure how to close it off since it needs to taper up. Ugh. I'll get there.
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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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Charity Goals

16. Donate at least $500.50 on Donors Choose.
17. Volunteer in a battered woman's shelter.
38. Volunteer with Habitat for Humanity for at least 101 hours.
44. Raise $500.50 by doing Walks for the Cure. As many as it takes to reach this goal.
65. Volunteer in a public library (or more than one) for at least 101 hours.
68. Loan $101 on Kiva; recycle all repayments.
69. Perform community awareness to raise an additional $500.50 for Kiva loan seekers.
70. Achieve 500,000 grains of rice on Free Rice for Spanish vocabulary.
71. Achieve 500,000 grains of rice in all other subjects.
94. Donate at least two articles of clothing at the end of every season.

Details

Giving back has always come slightly less than naturally to me. I like to help others, but I don't always know the best way to do it, and I've never really made a concerted effort at community service. I have participated in Feed the Children's back-to-school backpack donation drive for the past three years, which is why continuing to do so isn't on the list - this is about doing new things to connect me to our planet and the people on it. I tried to strike what I feel is an achievable balance between donating time and money, and if anyone has any suggestions on how best to achieve the volunteering goals, I would be eternally grateful for them.

16. Donate at least $500.50 on Donors Choose.

Some of you may be aware that I once thought I could hack it in a classroom, and tried to join up with Teach for America. Luckily, although I was "qualified" on paper, they could tell during the phone interview that I probably don't have the right disposition to handle a classroom of thirty inner-city kids. While I was researching TFA, though, I discovered their unofficial official blog site, where corps members are encouraged to write what's really going on in their heads through this experience, and not just the glowing, this-is-so-fulfilling! posts hosted on their actual website.

In any case, it was while reading one such Real Blog that I encountered a link to Donors Choose, where teachers write their own mini-grant requests for classroom materials that they need, and donors choose (har) to give part or all of the money needed for the project of their choice in order to help kids (presumably those attending lower-income schools that have far fewer resources readily available). I think it's an excellent idea, and so I hope to contribute at least $500.50 to the education of the next generation in the next 1001 days. Although this goal will (probably) not have its own tag, any time I donate to a project, I will post a link and description in this blog to track my total.

Current total: $100.00

17. Volunteer in a battered woman's shelter.

Let me begin by explaining why this goal, among every other goal on the list, is the most indefinite. Simply put, I'm not sure I'm strong enough to handle it. I will complete whatever the minimum number of shifts/hours/whatever the shelter I volunteer at requires, because I'm not a quitter, but I really don't want to commit myself to something that is going to wear me down too much, too fast, and ultimately be counterproductive to the people I mean to be assisting.

That said, this issue is very important to me because so many American women continue to be abused and disempowered by the men in their lives. It happens in secret, but it also happens with the knowledge of the neighbors, other family members, and sometimes even the police. I have a very nice theoretical knowledge of the problem of domestic violence because of my very nice liberal arts education. I want to change that theory into practice, and I want to learn from women who have removed themselves from bad situations and help find ways to end physical and psychological abuse.

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

I have always respected the work of Habitat for Humanity, and have always wanted to try it out. I am pretty good with a hammer and certain power tools (thank you, high school drama club!), and I like to paint, so I won't be a completely unskilled worker. Assuming I work eight-hour Saturdays (a big assumption, I admit), this goal will be complete after 12.65 shifts. It may take a while, or no time at all, to get started on this goal, considering I have no idea how the recession (and, duh, the housing/construction bust) is affecting Habitat's agenda. We'll see; each day that I volunteer, I will post at least one picture of me on a jobsite and update a running log of my hours with the additional "Habitat" tag.

Hours completed: 4

44. Raise $500.50 by doing Walks for the Cure. As many as it takes to reach this goal.

I've never done a Walk for the Cure before, but I assume the way it works is that you get people to sponsor you for each mile you walk/run/crawl across the finish line. This is a great goal for me, because it allows me to donate my time and other people's money, both of which, as a recent college graduate, there is plenty.

Current total: $23

65. Volunteer in a public library (or more than one) for at least 101 hours.

I love libraries. I love the idea of them, I love going into them and browsing, I love that the internet has simplified interlibrary loans and I can now get pretty much any book I'd ever want to read, even through the Volusia County Library system. I remember going to the library every other week or so during the summer as a kid to get fresh reading material, and I regularly checked out extra books from the library at Vassar just because there were SO MANY there, it seemed like it would be a giant waste to only read books I needed for class. As if I needed more of a reason to have this goal, my grandmother was a professional librarian for about thirty years. We go way back, libraries and me.

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

Kiva is something I either originally heard about in the New York Times, on a Hulu ad, or in the blog from which I discovered Mission 101. Like Donors Choose, it is a website that allows you to join others in donating small (or large) amounts of money to small business entrepreneurs in developing countries, most of whom are women who find it more difficult to get loans from banks or their governments than do men. For a very informative article about why microloaning is such a super idea for foreign aid, I direct you to this article in the NYT.

The idea on Kiva, specifically, is that you loan out however much money, and, after a time, your loanee begins to pay you back out of their newfound profits. I intend to recycle all the repayments I receive back into Kiva, that is, to continually be lending my initial $101. Recycled repayments received before I've loaned $101 will not count towards that total; as with Donors Choose, I will make a post each time I extend a loan. Because I anticipate that there will be many more such posts than with Donors Choose, this goal will have its own tag, "Kiva."

Loaned out: $25

69. Perform community awareness to raise an additional $500.50 for Kiva loan seekers.

Obviously, I think Kiva is a good idea. I want other people to think so, too, and to that end, I hope to do whatever it takes - meeting up with local business people, canvassing my neighborhood door to door, or setting up a table at a farmer's market or outside Wal-Mart - to get people to pledge $500.50 for Kiva loans. After I have done it myself a few times, I will know better how to achieve this goal, I think. Updates will also be under the "Kiva" tag.

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

If you don't have a Facebook account, you may have missed the 2007 launch of Free Rice - a website that gives you a vocabulary word and four choices of its definition. For each correct definition, Free Rice pledges to donate ten grains of rice to the UN World Food Program, and when you get one wrong, it tells you the correct answer and then repeats the word a bit later. In the last two years, they've expanded beyond English vocab to include foreign languages and other subjects, such as geography and chemistry symbols. Because I want to keep practicing Spanish as much as possible, even when I'm not doing Rosetta Stone, I want to get half of my goal of a million grains of rice doing solely Spanish vocab. Other charities allow you to donate your time and money; free rice allows you to donate your daily farting-around-on-the-internet time, too. I will post my weekly tally of grains donated in my weekly roundup posts.

Current total: 2500

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

English vocab, famous paintings, hell - I'll even take a crack at the German vocab - to get the second half of my million-grain goal.

Current total: 14790

94. Donate at least two articles of clothing at the end of every season.

If you've ever met me in real life, you probably are aware that I don't own very many clothes. I wear pretty much the same ten outfits every ten days... not on a fixed schedule or anything; that's just how it works out. I really only like that many clothes at a time. Fully one third of my wardrobe (that is, one dress, two shirts, and a few bras) are clothes I purchased in high school. Clothes have never been hugely important to me. However, I have, on occasion, tried to alter my fashion sense and purchased clothes that, although perfectly fine for some people, did not ever quite make it into regular rotation. And it's probably time to admit that I'm never going to be on What Not to Wear, so it's up to me to realize I'm a grownup and that some of my clothes are getting old, and that I need to start dressing a little better. As such, I plan on donating at least two articles of clothing four times a year. Any more than that actually seems really excessive to me, considering the small pool I have to pull from already, but obviously, I am never limited to just two. When these donations occur, you'll find out about it in its appropriate weekly update.

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