Anyone that knows me, knows that I have problems with focus (after all, when is the last time this blog was updated?) There is just so much out there to learn and explore, I often find myself drowning in the expansiveness of knowledge - I want to understand it all - modern art, popular culture, technology, literature, sociology, and (of course) my one true love: music. And my academic history is a reflection of that irking need to know more about almost anything: 4 majors as an undergraduate, a masters in museum studies (it doesn't get broader than that), and now I'm completing my MBA. Business? Yes.

I've often been questioned about why I'm studying business, and to be honest, until recently I never had an answer. I'm different from most MBA candidates - I'm not a working professional, I'm not looking to merely improve my status in my organization, and (GASP!) I'm not in it to get rich (and yes, I'm generalizing slightly). Certainly an MBA is a marketable degree, and I certainly considered that when I "joined up" (after all, as much fun as museum studies is - there just isn't a huge market for folks that know how to handle Peruvian pottery and 19th Century oil paintings). But I've come to terms with business management and I have also realized that business doesn't automatically equal scrupulous capitalism.

Business encompasses the nonprofit sector, the public sector, and, to my delight(!) a brilliant hybrid = social entrepreneurship.

Huh? Here's the Wikipedia definition:

A social entrepreneur is someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change. Whereas a business entrepreneur typically measures performance in profit and return, a social entrepreneur assesses success in terms of the impact s/he has on society. While social entrepreneurs often work through nonprofits and citizen groups, many work in the private and governmental sectors.

The main aim of a social enterprise is to further its social and environmental goals. This need not be incompatible with making a profit - but social enterprises are often non-profits. Social enterprises are for ‘more-than-profit’ (a term coined by a BBC journalist).

What does this mean, you say? I'm not sure yet... but it's got me thinking.

Who covets more, is evermore a slave. - Robert Herrick

I'm still chugging away on my crazy amount of school work. But here was a blog post that I just had to take the time to read. I hope that you will, too.

Black Friday Feminism
from Disobedient Mother. Disobedient Daughter.

Now, before anyone thinks that I am pro-recession, pro-depression, or anti-prosperity, let me squash those thoughts right now. As an American citizen and feminist, I recognize that the economy is run by consumers and the face of the global market largely depends on the flourishing of the US economy.

That being said, I offer this: Maybe this is an excellent time for US Americans to experience a financial crisis. Maybe there are some gains to be made in this difficult time which cannot be measured in the Dow Jones or home buying rates.

Black Friday is called Black Friday because it signifies when business companies are supposed to go into the black, showing surplus and profit. Notoriously, this is the day when US citizens open their wallet and begin the costly splurge of commercial gift-giving.

The less news I watch and the more observant I become of the people around me, the more I am convinced that this time of crisis can be an opportunity for many to deepen their lives and rethink the function of material goods in their homes. Perhaps a bit simplistic, but the concept of Americans re-evaluating what is necessary and what is superfluous in their homes sounds fabulous to me. It is common knowledge that US Americans are some of the most wasteful citizens on the planet, nonchalantly eating more than our share of the world's pie and throwing out any leftovers that weren't ours to begin with. We are all guilty of this. Our society thrives on convenience, comfort, and "if it's there, use it up" mentality.

What does this - consumerism, wastefulness, and intentionality - have to do with Feminism?

Alot.

Jessica Hoffman wrote an excellent article that envisioned what a feminist liberation looks like and how systematic powers (racism, economic hierarchy, ableism, sexism) - particularly capitalism - function as a multi-systematic team of oppression. She writes that it is not enough to recognize "intersectionality," as a lens to view feminists themselves, but also how to analyze the existing oppressive forces around us. She argues, "I do think that resisting capitalism, globally, is integral to antiracist, progressive, social-justice feminisms — that is, the only kinds of feminism I think have a chance of liberating anyone/everyone, and the only kinds of feminism I want to have anything to do with." MORE...

Put plainly, most would rather see a sermon than hear one. - The Global Living Project

From AlterNet

Living the Good Life on $5,000 a Year
by Kevin O'Connor

Today's global financial cloud got you feeling gray? Vermonter Jim Merkel sees a silver lining.
Back in 1989, the Long Island native was a weapons engineer who helped design a cutting-edge computer that could transmit military secrets, survive a nuclear blast and, a decade before the dawn of the BlackBerry, fit in the palm of his hand. Sitting at a hotel bar in Stockholm, Sweden, he was drinking in his accomplishment when a bulletin flashed on television.

An oil tanker had hit a reef half a world away in Alaska, spilling 11 million gallons of crude oil, contaminating 1,300 miles of coastline and killing more than 250,000 seabirds, otters, seals, bald eagles and whales. Video showed the culprit to be the Exxon Valdez. But peering into a mirror behind the bar, Merkel saw only himself.

He drove. He flew. He consumed goods produced with or propelled by fossil fuels.
"Of course, the entire industrialized world stood indicted beside me," he recalls. "Our 'need' for ever-more mobility, ever-more progress, ever-more growth had led us straight to this disaster. But in that moment, all I knew was that I, personally, needed to step forward and own up to the damage."

Returning home to the states, Merkel decided to simplify. He not only cleared away stuff (enough for 13 yard sales) but also tapped his engineering degree from New York's Stony Brook University to calculate the economic and environmental savings. By doing so, he figured out how to live comfortably -- and income-tax-free -- on $5,000 a year. More

Self is the only prison that can ever bind the soul - Henry Van Dyke

This blog post is going to seem a little off-topic. But I assure you - it is not. When I was 13 years old, my mother and my grandmother decided that it would be a good idea to take me to a Weight Watchers meeting. I spent my childhood being "big". I wasn't fat - the more I look at old pictures, the more I realize it, I was just bigger than normal. First of all, I was very tall for my age. Until I hit puberty, and everyone around me did also, I was the tallest kid in the class. Always. Second, I come from gigantic genes! My dad's family is full of amazons (not really - but he was 6'4", my aunt is awfully close to 6', and my grandmother was certainly NOT teeny). My mother's side is also made up of some tall, big people. Not to mention a shelf-like rear end that I have obviously inherited. But I did spend my childhood feeling... odd. Unsure of myself in my own skin. And then, at age 13, that idea that I had in my head about myself was confirmed. I was obviously fat, and I needed to be fixed... so I was taken to Weight Watchers.

Funnily enough, my stint at Weight Watchers at 13 was a one-time occurrence. My beautiful mother and grandmother, like me, were doomed to failure - in fact, as I recall, we went straight from that meeting to the Baskin & Robbins next door because "it is okay to treat yourself every so once in a while." Geesh, talk about mixed messages.

Luckily, as I've aged, I've begun to feel better about myself, how I look, and what I represent in to the world. It isn't all about looks, but I do LIKE to look good, and I get a big kick out of make-up and fashion - if for no other reason then make-up is like painting and fashion is creative and interesting.

So I loved this article/interview from Stephanie Losee on AlterNet.

Thin is the New Miserable

I know better than to diet constantly. Dieting makes you fat. Dieting makes you distracted. Distracted women tend not to make history. And yet here I am. Dieting. Even a global economic meltdown and a historic election could not take my mind off the fact that I have gained nearly 10 pounds and my wardrobe doesn’t fit. And I can’t afford to buy new clothes. Which means not only that I haven’t managed to find a way to take the shortest break from obsessing about my pants size, my dieting isn’t even working. But I don’t know any other way. My mother put me on my first diet when I was in the sixth grade, and I’ve been gaining and losing ever since.

It turns out I’m not alone -- my experience mirrors that of Valerie Frankel, self-help journalist and author of 19 books, including The Accidental Virgin. Thirty years after her mother put her on a diet to lose her baby fat, Frankel was still riding the dieting rollercoaster. She had vowed to keep her own daughters off it, but as they approached puberty, she began to suspect that not sabotaging their body image wouldn’t be enough.

"They had eyes and ears," she writes in her wry and affecting memoir, Thin is the New Happy. "They saw and heard what I put myself through: my dieting cycles, anxiety about food, dread of bathing-suit vacations, rising and falling and rising weight. I was a bad example."

Her efforts to become a good example required nothing less than a head-to-toe exorcism. She confronted her unrepentant mother, who said that if she could go back she wouldn’t act differently, even after Frankel catalogued the damage her mother’s harping had done. Frankel counted the number of negative thoughts she had about herself and her body every day (triple digits). She phoned one of the toughs who had taunted her in junior high. She posed naked in Self magazine. She asked her former Mademoiselle colleague Stacy London, now host of TLC’s "What Not to Wear," to help her throw out her figure-hiding, all-black wardrobe. And finally, she developed the Not-Diet, which had just four rules: Eat what you want. Stop when you’ve had enough. Don’t insist on perfection. Work out four times a week. Within a few months, she had reached a healthy weight and has maintained it, and her sanity, ever since. MORE...

Why am I talking about this? Because I, like so many, have spent a great deal of my life worrying about appearance and just worrying about MYSELF. I still do this, much more than I would like. Much more than I should. Don't we waste so much time thinking about the silly things - worrying with self-doubt, fearful of appearing _______ (fill in the blank: different, lazy, silly, stupid, too smart, unlovable, fat...)? How great would it be if I could take the effort that I've put into worry, and instead applied it to something useful and meaningful? Art, agriculture, feeding the hungry... so much wasted time.

I better learn how to starve the emptiness and feed the hunger - Emily Saliers

In discussion after discussion with some of my more conservative-minded family members, I have often made this argument: sure, if would be great if we could just all "take care of our own" and leave the government out of it when it comes to social/welfare aid. But not everyone has someone to fall back on. And that is, perhaps, where we reach a standstill. Non-profit organizations do what they can and do what they can to fill in the gaps. But, non-profit and government partnership-type organizations, like the food pantries discussed in the following article, are struggling to make ends meet and face the economic challenges that ALL businesses face: rising fuel prices, rising food prices, lack of funds, etc.

This is for your consideration:

When the Cupboard Is Bare
by David Cay Johnston - New York Times Online

REBECCA MUSCARELLO had long worked as a secretary, so she never imagined that at age 35 she would be left with no choice but to take her two children to a food pantry to get groceries. But like a growing number of Americans whose jobs have evaporated in a shrinking economy, Ms. Muscarello ran out of money and then food.

Since the spring, the number of people showing up hungry at food pantries and soup kitchens has surged, straining the capacity of many organizations in the vast, largely unseen and lightly financed network of volunteer emergency feeding operations. Many are newcomers who were reluctant to seek help until they had no choice.

In the four months since June, demand for food aid has risen 20 percent in areas of the country with the healthiest economies and more than 40 percent in areas with the weakest, leaders of nonprofit food-distribution organizations say. And they predict that the need will keep growing in 2009 if the job market continues to contract, as expected. More...

Seeing is deceiving. It's eating that's believing. - James Thurber

Here's a great article from AlterNet. Checkedy-check it out - it is a great resource!

Finding the Best, Local Food Near You Just Got Easier
By Tara Lohan, AlterNet. Posted November 15, 2008.

Food is making big headlines, and it's about time.
In a year marked by rising food prices and riots throughout the world, we've seen what happens when the reality of our energy, climate and water crises collides with trying to feed a planet. As Vandana Shiva writes in her newest book, Soil Not Oil, "The era of cheap food and cheap oil is over." Add to this changing precipitation patterns, melting glaciers and increasing drought from climate change, and we have a recipe for disaster.

Michael Pollan has warned the next incoming U.S president, "What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact -- so easy to overlook these past few years -- that the health of a nation's food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention."

While Barack Obama may have his hands full, the rest of us need to be thinking about our plates. Interestingly, one of the ways to start doing this would be to stay right where you are -- in front of your computer, that is. While technology may not always have been the best companion to agriculture (think biotech), the Internet has emerged as an incredible tool for planning the future of food. A Web site called the Eat Well Guide is hoping to help people make good decisions about what they eat and how, with a few clicks of the mouse.

Read the rest here.

And be sure to visit the Eat Well Guide.

Forget about your ego, forget about your pride, and you will never have to compromise - Indigo Girls

Agghhh....sorry blogosphere! I almost forgot today! School has been so crazy!

Check this out... you'll like it.
http://idealist.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=392992