In My Copious Free Time

This post is (RED), not pink

2009-12-01T09:47:51-05:00

I still remember the early days, when the disease we now call AIDS was larger than life, in every news broadcast, and almost completely misunderstood. I was a very young teen at the time, still grappling with issues like my own sexuality and the sexuality of others (remember that in the early days, AIDS was all too often characterized as a "gay disease"). I remember the fear (can I get it from kissing? sharing a soda? a mosquito bite?). I remember the sense of utter hopelessness I felt whenever I thought of this disease that seemed to be so mysterious and unstoppable.

Almost 30 years later, the pool of public knowledge about AIDS and HIV is almost as deep and unfathomable as those early fears were. The numbers remain staggering:

33.4 million people living with HIV worldwide
31.3 million adults
15.7 million women
2.1 million children under 15

(source)

In the face of such statistics, it can be easy to maintain that early helplessness or those same feelings of being powerless. With the pressures of life and the constant din of so many media sources telling us what we should care about, it can also be easy to forget that, despite the fact that it isn't in the news every day, AIDS kills almost 4 people every minute. (based on 2008 death rates) Feels immense, doesn't it? Unstoppable? I hope not.

Apparently I'm not the only person who believes that a lot of little actions can add up to great things and that we sometimes need an arbitrary marker as a reminder - it's beliefs like those that lead to days like today - World AIDS Day. Today we pay a little more attention to the breadth of this disease, the global implications of it, the cultural beliefs and behaviors which influence its spread, and the efforts underway to slow and stop it. We shine a light on the fact that this disease is still relevant and threatening, and even those of us who aren't vaccine researchers or powerful philanthropists can still do something to stop it. Here are just a few ways we can help in the course of this day:

Have a latte - Starbucks will donate 5 cents per handcrafted drink sold in the US and Canada today (5p in the UK, not sure about other countries)
Put on some lipstick - MAC sells a line of lipsticks and glosses called Viva Glam and not some percentage, but every cent of the retail price goes to the MAC Global AIDS Fund. The fund has raised $135 million to date to help women, men and children around the world. (And many of the shades are almost universally flattering, too.)
Pick up your holiday greeting cards. MAC sells greeting cards designed by children and Hallmark carries a line of Product (RED) cards as well. If you're going to get cards anyway, why not get some that give back?
Put some clothes on. Gap sells a great line of Product (RED) apparel for women and men. (They've sold products for kids in the past, but I don't see any on their website today.)
Need to buy a Dell netbook or iPod as a holiday gift? Why not buy it in a snazzy red version?
Always wondering "what's that song playing?" Then download the Shazam (RED) app for iPhone. The $2.99 app "listens" to whatever music is playing and identifies the song and artist and provides handy links that direct you to the iTunes store for preview and purchase, or to a Youtube video.

Or, go straight to the source and make a donation. Here are a couple of organizations that would be glad to take your money:

The Global Fund

National AIDS Fund

The Children's AIDS Fund

thankful to be thankful

2009-11-25T08:59:47-05:00

It's been a tough year in the world - the economy in near death spiral, so many people struggling, the Yankees winning the World Series...so I thought I'd take a minute or two today before the craziness of cooking tomorrow sets in to think about the myriad ways I am blessed and so very thankful. This list is not meant to be exhaustive, all-inclusive or earth-shatteringly original, but rather a snapshot of a life that is quite fortunately too full to catalog in a mere blog post.

So, let's get on with some thankfulness, bullet style...

A child who is a delight and marvel and a joy, who changes a little bit each day but still carries this incredible sweetness with him
A husband who does the not-fun stuff without fail, massages my hands to help me fall asleep when I have a headache, and knows exactly where to squeeze during a hug to pop my back
A body that is healthy and strong and serves me well
A sister who makes me laugh, picks me up at the airport and always tells it straight
A few friends who are always there for me, no matter what - friends who I should talk to more, but no matter how often we talk, we easily pick up where we left off
The awesomest workplace imaginable, with opportunity to grow, where people care about each other and work is seen in the context of your life rather than work being a separate entity with life tucked in around the margins
A year filled with some great travel for both work and pleasure - including that view of the Eiffel Tower from my hotel room
The love of my mother that still fills my heart - the quiet realization that if you love someone, they really are always with you
The Alabama Crimson Tide is 11-0
The perfect pair of black riding boots
Great soup in the freezer
My iPhone, which ensures that I always have directions, email and a way to pass the time in long grocery store lines
Glee
Chanel Vendetta polish on my toes
Starbucks chai latte with no water
Poetry all around me
Vaccines in nasal mist form so that Alex freaks out a bit less
Southwest Early-bird Check In
That some people actually read this blog and occasionally post comments to let me know they're paying attention
My ever-expanding collection of mini bags and pouches to keep stuff organized in my purse
Glitter and sparkle
Hot, buttered whole-wheat toast
The ability to give back and help someone who spent a lot of years sacrificing for my sake
The times I actually remember to bring my reusable bags into the grocery store or Target
No snow before Thanksgiving!!
Disney Vacation Club
Co-workers who make me laugh and are good enough to laugh back, even at my bad jokes
Bamboo sheets
Not being afraid to get up early to shop on what really is the single best shopping day of the year. (note to self - post about how awesome people really are on this shopping day)
Hair that curls with no effort
Sleeping late on weekends
Online shopping and free shoe return mailing
Being able to sign up for a 5k even though I haven't run in weeks and weeks with reasonable certainty that I will finish the race with no problems
Plurk, Twitter, Facebook and Gmail
Awesome apps like Shazam and Evernote
Singing along with Alex in the car (current favorites - "Build Me Up, Buttercup," "Man in the Mirror," and "Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys")
My sterling silver tongue scraper (so much better than the plastic ones you get at Target)
Vosges milk chocolate bacon bars and Bapchi's caramel toffee
An organized makeup storage chest
Quiet time in the morning to do things like make long lists
Hot baths
Ed, my shoe guy
Guitar Hero
Obama in the White House
The prospect of health care reform
Johnny Depp
3 out of 4 office plants that are still living

This could go on all day, but since today is a short day at work and I usually don't roll into the office until 10 or 10:30, perhaps I ought to close this up and get ready to go so I get at least 2 hours of work in. (Thankful that we are closing at noon!)

Happy Thanksgiving to all - may you have more blessings than you can count, and may you find ways to spread your good fortune with others.

I've been mooned

2009-11-22T02:43:31-05:00

For as long as there have been creatures who could dream and wonder, they've gazed at the moon with fear and awe. It was a moon much like the one pictured here that helped inspire this poem, along with the memory of a poster on the wall of my high-school girl self and snippets of song lyrics by the person on the poster which happened to come out of my iPod that morning.

--------------------------------------------

Measures

The measure of a morning,
Twelve even, brick-red ovals,
A misshapen, onionskin moon
Ambling toward the horizon.

I look ahead now,
Toward a wall that isn't there.
A wall I will myself towards—
One more, one more.

I, I was standing
You were there.

I'm not standing anymore.

Once, when he looked back from another wall,
Eyes heavy and beckoning,
I thought I was moving,
But it was a chimera,
Created by the speed
Of life flowing around me.
Just as the passing river
Could trick me into thinking I was moving
As I watched the ripples lap past my grandmother's pier.

Happiness is not rooted in place.
It is the flowing water, not the solitary dock.

But once I started moving,
No one ever kept up.
He can't now, of course,
But he isn't the only one.

It is always the same—
Out of the void comes
A peripheral jumble and then
…Convergence.
Footfalls in unison.
And I want it to
Go
Please, let it just go on
Forever.
But I cannot maintain forever.
I can only maintain this singular stride.

Neurons still vibrate with the wish as
The feet fall out of sync,
The planes diverge.

When you looked back from the wall, you were wrong.
Worlds don't collide.

And when each trails away,
I am betrayed
I find the fault in myself,
Doubting my own gravity.

Perhaps there is no fault,
Only a difference in pace,
Mine always pushing me ahead
Until looking back reveals nothing
But the gentle arc of what once was
As I orbit the center
And the moon slides away.

--------------------------------------------

And the song that played a part in this...

Photo:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcwetboy/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

It just LOOKS like a small world

2009-10-08T08:14:14-04:00

Tilt-shift photography is awesome. I don't know quite how it works to take life-size scenes and make them look as if they're the world's most detailed miniatures--it just does. I just came across a terrific example of tilt-shift video. In some places you can tell it's live action because of people's movement (long shots work better), but in many places you'll find yourself thinking, "That can't be real."

Maybe I'm just excited by this because I'll be there in 29 days, in the flesh--and in actual size.

Why are there so many songs about rainbows?

2009-06-25T06:45:00-04:00

I've been doing a lot of iTunes clean-up lately. Serious cleaning - I've deleted about 600 songs and I've done a lot of editing of poorly named or untitled tracks. (Several years ago someone gave me CDs of the Billboard Top 100 for the years 1960-2001, so needless to say I had a HUGE amount of music just from those CDs, which included a lot of stuff I just didn't care about.)

Anyhow, in the clean-up I discovered I have "The Rainbow Connection," so I loaded it onto my iPod that I keep in the car. I played it last night for Alex and he really enjoyed it. When I told him it was Kermit the Frog singing he thought a moment and said, "He's not bad for a frog."

Personally, I think his singing is just average for frogs. His banjo playing, however, is second-to-none in the amphibian world.

I'm Gonna Be (13 Miles)

2009-06-24T08:13:07-04:00

First of all, how awesome is MTV Music? So what if they don't play videos on MTV anymore - they play them whenever I want, on demand, on my computer. Sweetness.

The Proclaimers |MTV Music

Because the new iPhone has built-in Nike + AND I had to get a new sensor since the old one finally died, I decided to start anew on the Nike + website, which syncs run information directly from the phone. Innocuous enough, right? Well, I started playing around on the site, something I'd never done since I never really used it consistently in the first place. I noticed the training programs link and once on that page, there it was, staring me in the face:

HALF MARATHON

In all honestly, it looked more like this:

HALF MARATHON

Imagine that in some spiky font with little heat lines coming off of it, as if it just rose up out of the bowels of hell. Also, imagine it flashing.

It looked big. It looked scary. (I know you're thinking it - "that's what she said.") It looked impossible.*

So naturally, I signed right the hell up.

I usually run 2 miles a day, sometimes 2.5 miles. On a good day, I'll run 5k, but let's face it, I'm not a distance runner. I've run a 10k. Once. So I'm really not sure what I'm thinking or doing**, but it just seems like the thing to try. Or do. Just do it. Do or do not, there is no try.

I'm going to go lace up my shoes and see if I can come up with more hackneyed motivational expressions. In the meantime, if you all never hear from me again, it's because running the first 4 miles was the end of me.

*Actually, it looked like a little, robin's egg blue square. I exaggerate.
**I suspect that a tiny part of this is being inspired as all get-out by Donna Downey's story of becoming a runner (in the midst of losing something like 50 pounds). I used to think I couldn't be a runner, like Donna thought. But now I am. I used to think I couldn't run very far or run something as big as a half-marathon. I want to prove myself wrong.

I want to be just like Cathy Z

2009-06-23T12:46:00-04:00

That's what you'd think, anyway since I'm shamelessly stealing her blog post idea. It's okay though, since she shamelessly stole it from Ali Edwards. And if you don't know who these women are, you should check out their blogs. Both are very talented visual designers and artists.

On with the larceny...

Outside my window... the treetop is swaying in the breeze

I am thinking... about a conversation I had with my boss yesterday and about the housework I need to do tonight.

I am thankful for... Google Reader.

From the kitchen... this is so not applicable to my life, but I will say that the kitchen still smells like the pizza we had for dinner last night.

I am wearing...olive linen pants and a gauzy black top and black flip flops.

I am creating... plans in my head for the scrapbook pages I won't have time to work on tonight.

I am going... to finish this client contract revision today.

I am reading... well, at the moment I'm reading a data report for a client, but the book I'm in process of reading is I Was Told There Would be Cake

I am hoping... that I get everything done that needs to get done before I leave for vacation.

I am hearing... the sound of the a/c.

Around the house... I dunno - it's there and I'm here.

One of my favorite things... cashews.

A few plans for the rest of the week... finish up the work on my desk, get a pedicure, cut Alex's hair (or take him to get it cut), clean house, pack, fly to Alabama to visit my family on Thursday.

Second best check memo ever

2009-06-03T23:39:49-04:00

In David Sedaris's story "Youth in Asia," he relays the story of how his mother sent him a check to cover the cost of having his cat cremated. He writes:

In the left-hand corner, on the line marked MEMO, she'd written, "Pet burning."

Tonight, I got a check of my own.

It's no secret I'm a big fan of David Sedaris. (I'm just going to skip over the not one, not two, but THREE different random lists I've posted that mention him.) Tonight he was at Borders and since Joe left for Minneapolis to visit his brother today, I took Alex with me to the mall for the reading. He started with a new story (one he said he'd never read) about the preponderance of public making-out in Paris. (Aside 1: I really wanted to say "necking" there because "public making-out" seems awkward, but who on earth says "necking" anymore? Aside 2: I thought I'd turned into a prude when I saw all the public making-out in Paris in March, so it was a relief to know that it isn't just me.) He went on to read a fable about a cat who visits a baboon for some grooming before attending a party and then read a bunch of entries from his diary.

The normal Q&A followed and I asked if he had any good books to recommend, and he did, joking that this was going to seem like a set-up since we were in a bookstore and I went along, laughing and saying I'd pick up my check after the reading. During the Q&A, however, he said he had a project that maybe we could help with. "I need a nerd," he proclaimed. He was going to pick someone and then suggested someone in the crowd might be a better nerd-spotter, but then people wanted clarification. What would this nerd need to do? A job description was in order. Sedaris revealed that someone had said they saw him on Twitter ("Tweeter" he called it), but he is not, in fact, on Twitter. He was disturbed that he had an impostor and needed help putting a stop to this and would pay someone $50 for this service. Being a long-time Twitter-er and having one of its founders as a friend (meaning I can send him a direct message), I immediately piped up "Oh, I can take care of that!"

Brash? Probably. But what the hell - I wasn't positive I could fix it, but I was damn sure I could come closer than anyone else there! Sedaris told me to come up and see him after the reading, so Alex and I marched over and waited in the priority line to talk to him.

And yes, my seven-year-old knows who David Sedaris is. He pronounced the whole event "cool" and said, "As far as I know, I'm the first kid in my whole second grade that has gotten to meet David Sedaris." No offense to Sedaris, but I assured him he's probably the only kid in his whole second grade who even knows who David Sedaris is. Sedaris also seemed impressed when he offered Alex some candy and Alex politely answered, "No, thank you." I'm not sure what was more remarkable to him - the manners or the fact that he turned down chocolate.

Anyhow, we had a short conversation about Twitter and what I would do to help him out and suddenly he pulls out his checkbook. I insisted he didn't need to pay me and he insisted that he did, and then Alex chimed in saying, "Let him pay you, Mommy!" So I let David Sedaris write me a check for $50. Then he pulled out a little note pad from a Ritz-Carlton and wrote his email address on it and gave it to me. It wasn't until after I'd left the bookstore that I noticed the memo line he wrote:

Twitter end

Some people would be most excited about the check. Some would be most thrilled over the email address. (Not that I'm not.) Perhaps I'm easily amused, but it's the check memo that does it for me.

From the wilds of the upstairs bathroom...

2009-05-26T12:45:44-04:00

Tara Youknow

Too excited to sleep

2009-05-10T00:35:09-04:00

Tomorrow, on Mother's Day, we leave on a vacation to Walt Disney World that represents a lot of firsts. Our first official stay as Disney Vacation Club members. Joe's first vacation from his new job. When we planned this trip, we were really trying to fit it in between some other work events of mine (which later were rescheduled, naturally). But now that it's upon us, I'm delighted with how the scheduling has worked out. We're leaving on Sunday - this means that on Friday I just had to worry about wrapping things up at work. I didn't have to rush myself through knowing that I had to get home to finish packing, zip over for the traditional pre-vacation pedicure, etc. So Friday ended up being much calmer than I've ever experienced a last-day-of-work-before-vacation day being. That left me (and us) with a full day to wrap up whatever we needed to. We ran errands, finished up the laundry, finished packing at a leisurely pace. And we're returning home on Saturday evening at about 7:30. That gives us Sunday to recover. This couldn't have worked out better if I'd planned it myself. Except that I did plan it myself.

Needless to say, we're all excited. On the way to school earlier this week, Alex made a giddy little sound and said "Oh Mommy, I'm so excited! Four days until Disney!" I asked him what he was most excited about and he immeditaely responded, "The place with the fountains where I get to push the elevator button." Now, keep in mind that the child always gets to push the elevator button. I'm so fully trained on this matter that it isn't unusual for me to get in an elevator and then wait, forgetting that I am "allowed" to push the button. But what was this place he was so excited about? I asked a few questions to try to identify the spot and then he said something telling and (stifling the urge to giggle) I asked "Kiddo, do you mean the parking garage at the airport?"

"Yes!" came the resounding and enthusiastic response. All this effort and expense and the kid's favorite thing is a parking garage.

He then moved on, saying that the night before we left hewas going to say he's too excited to sleep. Of course, this is an inside joke with us - several years ago there was a commercial with two little kids, unable to sleep because they're so excited about their trip the next day to Walt Disney World. When the mom tells them it's bedtime, the little boy says....well, I'll let you see for yourselves...

So that's us. Except that, while I am excited, I am definitely going to sleep! This is another first! I can't remember the last time we went on vacation and I got more than 2 hours of sleep the night before. Sometimes I don't get any sleep given the early morning flights and my packing work. But getting about 5 hours on vacation eve - that's a vacation in and of itself.

And now, excited or not, I'm off to bed!