I'm not khaki pants grrl

packing. is a bitch. but there are moments, where i realize -- hey i really like this brown dress! but just like the last two times i packed it, i also realize i got no shoes and no little sweater whatever to go w/ it. other moments, i want to throw my hands up at all the stupid button down shirts, the multitude of pants that never quite flatter, but fit that "smart business casual bill" (if no one notices holes from my bike chain) ...

this post is stupid. my point is essentially, i can't reinvent myself via my wardrobe. not that i know what i'd wear, but it wouldn't be those stupid khaki pants that i'm going to pack anyways.

Crushing Idealism

2006, age 26. The nexus between youthful and young adult, the space where the rubber hits the road, or dreams become dead. Visions always seem brighter than reality just as acheivement seems more possible than achieving. It's easy to say -- my shooting staryness has yet to reach peak brilliance, I'm the crackling spitting ever burning fuse to the eternally fabulous fourth of july fireworks show, oh, I'm going to be big, I'm going to really do something here folks, just you wait and see. Meanwhile . . . The essence of possibility, the hope of being utterly and completely fabulous. It fades like your long-grown-out highlights, chips like the cheap & quickly painted walls of your flat. Surrounded by actuality, aspiration takes bravery. Survival becomes pre-eminent, the mudane laden with meaning: (your microwave really should be the top of the line - afterall, how else would you eat?) Society an afterthought, advertising self-indulgence to proclaim your stake and place. An easy facade for the more disturbing thought that you gave up or never gave yourself a chance in the first place. Capital continuously a proxy for something other than whatever it is you were really looking for -- or maybe you never were looking. For your self, god, man, the truth - existence in a nutshell, the ever larger quest of humanity. Constantly we create it by being, and in not being or doing, fear looms, disappointment promises.

Goodbye

This isn't the first time
I've tried to say
goodbye
to you

All the times you've helped me
Even though it was
just going grocery shopping
or cleaning my room

Those times, without you,
take on a new meaning
because they're empty
of you

and full of me. Myself and my
desire to
be many things

I can confront
- without you there to distract.

Independence
a deep breath
the fragile beauty of my own
small steps
delights, reassures, makes me wonder
why couldn't i do this by myself
before?

before you, before you made me second guess myself
(or did i turn to you because i was second guessing)
panic beating my chest into a cavern
into which i drowned
the eyes through which i peer
seeing, feeling, a swirling world

you were my rope. i pulled myself to a higher place
through you. accepted the depth of life. rushing screaming in
its complexity, meaning, and pain.
so i thought.

we've had a long enough relationship
i won't make accusations and nasty charges
blame everything on you
i've said goodbye and hello enough times to you
to think, maybe this won't be the last time.

maybe this won't be the last
time you hold me
caress
titallate
and scare the shit out of me.

a birds eye view of suffering and fear and pain and hate
in my heart, hearts beating around the world
is enough to drive anyone nuts
you, my friend-almost-lover, have had enough fun
with your dark poems
fantastical visions --
it's just enough.

maybe
saying there's a future
is intrinsic to saynora

but the future i see with you
can be nothing like the
past we've had.

Diversity in Business -- Notes

today I went to the first annual conference on "Diversity in Business". I began the day by inadvertently spilling coffee all over one of the tables, my notebook and hand bag. Fabulous. Mostly the conference was a blah blah blah experience. It did help me flesh out some of my ideas about my research more. I think. Maybe. Slipped the diss by leaving the conference schmooze fest w/out talking to Sam from GSK. Pulled a drive-by "hi and bye" and feel a little bad about not talking a little or getting his card. Oh well.

My coffee stained notes from George A. Strait, Jr.'s address this morning, say he began his journalism career in radio and television b/c the stations needed someone black to keep their license. He was the first black on tv b/c of pressure from the black community. He talked about the pressure of needing to report on perceived black topics as a black reporter. For example, multiple stations assigned their one black reporter to cover race riots.

That theme was alluded to throughout the day -- that people of color might be recruited for different positions than white people. While blacks (or other minorities) may be asked to serve on diversity panel after diversity panel, those time-consuming activities might not be considered in promotion conversations. In fact, one of the challenges Strait discussed was that as a minority in a higher-level position, a lot of time can be spent mentoring other minorities, and one has to keep a watchful eye on getting their main task/work done.

Strait said he felt responsible to his community first, and in the white-male dominated environment, he was able to maintain his identity as an African-American through his ability to choose who to include in his journalistic pieces, to have a diverse expert pool, and by staying in contact with diverse communities.

In 1972, there were four black anchors on the major television stations. In 2000, there were 19. He mentioned "in such small numbers there's an explicitly discriminatory environment."

B Rolls: used as filler footage, stations have different stock footage for such things as "welfare" or "poverty" which Strait identified as being racist. Eventually at ABC these tapes were all burned through the efforts to have these become more balanced and accurate visuals.

Recruiting for Diversity
This panel included reps from Clorox, Deloitte, PwC and Wells Fargo. Diversity was defined the following ways:
Clorox - primary - traits you're born with, secondary - things tht change throughout life
Deloitte - inclusion of various thoughts
Wells Fargo - appreciate for difference and encouraging and recognizing diversity in everything we do

I found this panel to be corporate feel-good blather with lots of head-nodding and repetition. They agreed that it's improtant to include diversity in the vision and values, and more importantly to include it in people's goals and hold them accountable. For partners, they need to retain and develop certain percentages of diverse whatever (customers, staff?)

The business case for diversity was essentially stated as: US demographic predictions show a much more diverse country, with increased purchasing power of minorities. It would be a heavy risk for companies to not invest in diversity.

Okay, I'm debating how useful this exercise is to type up my notes. This is getting boring, I think I'm going to go do my laundry instead.

blllaaaahhhh

I have a sneaking suspicion that graduate school is an emotional rollercoaster:
Why am I here? What am I doing? WHY am I doing it? Wait, what are my interests again? What do you mean the fellowship application I submitted last year is "ineligible"??!

work sucks! people do it for the money!

on a roadtrip long ago cross the US of A - escaping the east coast to be an artist in Colorado (or to "study for the LSATS" as I told my mother) - I thought, what if people just did what they wanted to do in life. That instead of trying to figure out what they "should" do - ie how to most effectively put veal in their williams-sonoma skillets - they just followed their hearts and actualized their dreams?

reading Marx today I remembered that. He wrote:

"The worker does not affirm himself in his work but denies himself, feels miserable and unahppy, develops no free physical and mental energy but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind."

"Labor appears not as an end in itself but as the servant of wages."

So we do it for the money. There's this question out there - what would you do if you didn't have to worry about money?

blah blah blah false needs, creation of needs, system of needs, division of labor... go sing a song or paint a picture like you really want to. seriously, people.

superstardom - or lack thereof...

there's this pressure, it feels like, to be some sort of superstar. once you reach a certain strata, you can - like the people you've left behind - chill, become a wallflower, be that someone not desinted to reach the next universe, an existence of glory. Or, as you've done before, make it to the next level - The person that others watch fly off to the land beyond....

what is that land beyond? the next strata, the infinite - where you become the watched, not the watcher.

your existence - intruded on - yet, an image for the masses to wonder at, reflect at, to think to themselves, so this is how a star lives...

How many of these superstar people are born into their lives, their destinies, these lives of hierarchy - predestined stratification.... How many of us create these destinies ourselves, want it, become it, need it... and why?