when the truth becomes a lie

Mike Daisey, a story-teller/monologist who was recently featured on This American Life criticizing Apple and "exposing" their seemingly atrocious labor practices, has now been publicly exposed (also on This American Life) as a "liar." it turns out that Daisey fabricated a majority of the vivid and extremely personal stories he shares in his one-act, The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. (and Ira Glass is ostensibly pissed!!)


while this perhaps causes some Mac enthusiasts to rejoice, i am personally unswayed. and while i believe in the importance of journalistic integrity, i also hate to see a well-meaning story-teller publicly (albeit gently and rightfully) skewered at the hands of Ira Glass. the thing is, while it is now clear that some of what Daisey said was not 100% true or accurate, in the sense that it did not happen in the perfect story, movie-like way he describes in his monologue, there were essences and bases of truth in what he said. and while i was initially somewhat upset with Mike Daisey for seemingly misleading lots of people, i think the work he did was extremely important, if only because he personified and made tangible/personal the human injustice problems underlying the manufacture of our first-world luxuries. he exposed and made visible the human factor that is sacrificed at the altar of Commodity. granted, the details of Daisey's stories were tweaked and altered to achieve maximum impact, but sometimes the greater "truth" is best achieved thru some tactful lying. this brings to mind the chapter of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried in which he describes the difference between "truth" and "story-truth" and how sometimes you have to build compelling stories around a truth to give the truth even more truth. in both cases, the "truth" being served justifies some lying, wouldn't you agree?


furthermore, the "truth" in this situation is arguably subjective and particularly difficult to determine. as someone who works in a chinese manufacturing company, very similar to ones that work for Apple and FoxConn, i have seen the way these internal audits are run. i've also seen how things in the company are done, from concealing misdeeds, to ensuring "outsiders" don't see the true operations of the company. i would not be at all surprised if it turned out Daisey's translator was paid off by someone from FoxConn to make adjustments to her story. she might even feel some fear in being complicit in Daisey's takedown of FoxConn and Apple. furthermore, i'm struck by how strange and very messed up it is to hear multiple American journalists working somewhat hard to justify the working conditions in China, basically to the effect of "oh, it's China, and they do stuff like that there. we can't compare working conditions there to America, that just wouldn't be 'fair.'" statements like these, by Americans working really hard to justify a shitty system of labor and economics that makes profit and products on the backs of unprotected and un-unionized foreign workers, make me extremely angry all over again, and make me realize just how important Mike Daisey's work was, and make me sad that now it may be forever discredited for being a "lie." it's clear, from hearing so many Americans rushing to defend Apple in the wake of the original story and even more fervently after its retraction, that the problem with America and capitalism and all of its conveniences, is that products such as the iphone are an entity more real than the workers who make them. this is a serious problem. Daisey's stories were important, because they forced us to care about something we previously took for granted. we'd never before thought to ask ourselves who the person behind our iphones/ipads/ipods was, never thought to question the existence and practices of the supply chain that supplies an endless number of goods to enable our very convenient, modern lives, and never thought to question our own place in that economic ecosystem and the moral implications of such a passive stance. the really sad thing is that now that Daisey has come forward for fabricating his story, 


when i listen to the retraction episode, i'm struck by how badly Mike Daisey wanted his American audience to feel something, to feel empathy for the Chinese factory workers, to feel some sense of consumer conscience and responsibility and feel incited to change. even if he achieved this in a deceitful way, is it so bad he tried to get us all to feel something, and do something about it?


even if the details of Daisey's story are not completely true, the truth underlying his story is, and that has yet to change; the working conditions at Chinese factories such as FoxConn are not fair, and the subpar working conditions continue to be condoned and widely practiced because companies like Apple have not yet taken adequate action to prevent and stop them, and because American customers have yet to express their demands for change.


what follows is an excerpt from the end of the retraction episode i find particularly pertinent: 

Ira Glass: But to get to the normative question that’s kind of underlying all the reporting and all the discussion of this, the thing that we all want to know when we hear this is like, “Wait, should I feel bad about this?” As somebody who owns these products, should I feel bad? […]

Charles Duhigg: Let me pose the argument that people have posed to me about why you should feel bad, and you can make of it what you will.
 And that argument is there were times in this nation when we had harsh working conditions as part of our economic development. We decided as a nation that that was unacceptable. We passed laws in order to prevent those harsh working conditions from ever being inflicted on American workers again.

And what has happened today is that rather than exporting that standard of life, which is within our capacity to do, we have exported harsh working conditions to another nation.
So should you feel bad that someone is working 12 to 24 hours a day in order to produce the iPhone that you’re carrying in your pocket? […] Should you feel bad about that? I don’t know, that’s for you to judge, but I think the the way to pose that question is… do you feel comfortable knowing that iPhones and iPads and other products could be manufactured in less harsh conditions, but that these harsh conditions perpetuate because of an economy that you are […] supporting with your dollars. […] You’re not only the direct beneficiary [of those harsh conditions]; you are actually one of the reasons why it exists. If you made different choices, if you demanded different conditions, if you demanded that other people enjoy the same work protections that you yourself enjoy, then those conditions would be different overseas.

Ira Glass and Charles Duhigg of the NY Times, discussing working conditions in Apple factories in China [from This American Life’s recent episode, in which they discover Mike Daisey fabricated parts of his story on working conditions in FoxConn factories in Shenzen, China].

living, will

death has been on my mind a lot lately. well, more than usual. ever since i was a kid, i've lived in fear of death, lived in fear of that great expanse of unknown beyond my last breath, in fear of my parents' death, haunted by the sudden passing of friends and family gone too soon. who was it that said life is just the act of dying? or "the day we are born we begin to die"? i hate to think of my life as a shadow negative of this inevitability, but there can be no denying it. i think learning to live is in many ways learning how to die.

this has become more pressing lately. when my Uncle Tony passed away ... spring of 2009, my entire foundation was rocked. it was one of my first years truly living away from home - out of college, working my first real-life, "grown-up" job as a teacher in a public middle school in south central - and i got the news in the middle of a school day, maybe it was even a wednesday. this was the thing i'd always feared, my entire life: leaving home and being away and alone and having to truly assume adulthood when i'd only previously been playing the part. acting like an "adult" in front of a room of insane and belligerent special ed 6th graders, while your entire understanding of reality and space/time is being torn asunder around you is truly an initiation into "adulthood" by means of trial by fire. i have never wanted to punch an eleven-year-old special needs child so much in my entire life.

that first experience of death, trying to understand the definitiveness, the finalness, the never-again-ness, changed me. it ripped the fabric of logic and reason, made my persistent daily wants and needs and desires seem cruel, selfish, terrible. i disgusted myself, felt disgusted at other people, at my/our insistence on living. my hunger pangs, my exhaustion, my cravings for warmth or kindness or whatever were just constant reminders of my own body's persistent fight to stay alive, to feed itself, to rest, to recover. all this pained and aggravated me, since it was also a reminder that these were things my uncle once did, and now won't.

the day after i heard the news, i remember, i emerged from my dark room, where i'd spent the majority of the day [which makes me think the news might have occurred closer to a weekend, or that i was still doing this - violently weeping - several days after the fact] on my bed in a fetal position, my body pinched in on itself in a full-body sob, weeping uncontrollably and relentlessly, and walked outside to get some fresh air (again, the body's urge to do what it needs to survive; in this case, getting some air and sunlight and resuming an upright, healthy posture). the sight of seagulls flying above the palm trees overhead, the sun shining in an almost cloudless sky, the onslaught of terrifying LA rush-hour traffic - all seemed to be terrible, disrespectful, indignant external reminders that life goes on; this day is, in all other respects, just like any other.

---

i have been reading Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, a birthday gift from my brother this past year. i don't remember how i came to hear about this book, but one day at work i was reading about different psychological phenomena, and "magical thinking" was mentioned, and the book's premise interested me, and since i've spent some part of the last year reading "award-winning" books, i asked for it for christmas. it has been... an informative book. well-researched and well-written, definitely, and interesting, although i hesitate to say "pleasurable," since of all the effects it has had on me, it's probably inspired an even deeper and more paranoid ideation with death, the "act" of dying, and living.

one of the ideas from Didion's book that's really stuck is the idea that the dying person can foretell their death, even in cases accidental or sudden. "Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left." this is, in some ways, a comfort, especially to those who have lost a loved one in tragic accidents, to know that perhaps they knew their time was coming. but, in my case, it's been a terrible fear-enhancer. suddenly, things my parents or friends do, like tell me they love me in an exceptional way, or giving me an important document, seem like portents of doom. and i know that's a terrible thing, like, the prime example of letting fear of death control your life and thoughts. i know it is the mark of a coward to live in constant fear of death, but, here i am. and what to do?

naturally, the thing to do is to prepare. this constant, unebbing thought that "we all know when our time has come" has, of course, come to make me think that perhaps i am about to die. (and even as i write this, i wonder to myself, will typing it make it even more true? will uttering this aloud make it come true, or stave it off?) does the fact that i persist on this notion indicate that i am nearing death, that this book and this idea, given to me so recently, is relevant for a reason, that reason being that something terrible is about to happen? i can't help wondering these things, even though i know it makes me crazy.

last month, my partner Ben lost his younger brother Andrew in a terrible accident. he had been living abroad for nearly 2 years, travelling and teaching in China and Taiwan. he was on a ten-day bike journey around the island of Taiwan, during his 2-week Chinese New Year holiday, when he was struck by an old man driving a van. Andrew died. (typing that still hurts, because it hasn't yet felt real. typing that feels like betrayal, like i've given up hope Andrew can still come back, like i've turned my back on him because i've accepted this reality, even though my mind and heart (and Andrew) live now in a reality separate from what that sentence means). in the days and weeks following, friends and family who knew Andrew have been grappling to understand what happened. friends received Christmas cards from him just days after the accident. i looked back on our exchanges, scrutinized emails, trying to examine them for clues that Andrew, in some way, knew. Andrew and i spoke via email just days before it happened, and i talked to him about visiting Taiwan in the summer, with Ben, and he replied that he was so excited for us to come, he couldn't wait to show us around. the day before the accident, i wanted to post something on his Facebook, commenting on one of his pictures, saying something about how he looked so much like his dad. i didn't, i hesitated and then decided not to, because i wasn't sure how he'd respond or take the comment. i wonder now, if i'd posted it, if he would have paused in the morning to read and respond, and would have thus been a minute or two behind on the road when the van swerved off and hit him where he was, without the comment.

Andrew kept a bucket list, or as he called it, a "to-do list." he didn't want to be an old man looking back at his life with regret. did he know? even if his to-live list wasn't a premonition, he understood that life is precious and fragile and not to be wasted - a profoundly inspiring wisdom borne from an acknowledgment of death; Andrew knew how to live. this is what i want for myself and for my fear of death, a greater appreciation and predilection for living.

Andrew's bucket list was a physical list he checked off and added to. i love that, i love that there are documents that speak to his life and his goals. now that we've lost Andrew (where did you go?) these documents - to-do-lists, journals, emails, blog posts, Facebook - are what we have left, what we can return to. this is my document.*

these days, we are all susceptible to getting lost in the daily grind, on focusing on ends rather than means, and thinking about a distant future rather than enjoying the present. i think living in the constant shadow of death can mean reclaiming life, and i intend to do that.


*i wrote previously about maintaining an e-life thru internet documents here, on my very first blog.

spunk (n), definition:

how fuckin' fun and cute is Robyn in this? i think it's even better than the music video because girl can sing.



and when she does her somersault and tries to slide her feet up on the floor but can't because she's wearing gigantic rubber soles? my heart melted a little bit for her. *girl crush*

alone in the wilderness

i'm tired of all the sturm und drang associated with valentine's day. suddenly it becomes especially important to be with someone and examine your life in the context of being successfully paired off. is it ok for some people to want to be alone? what if that is what makes them happy? i think that's ok, and it's not just because i'm feeling particularly alone today.

this is probably not the best place for these kinds of thoughts, since it's so public and all, but that's also why it's perfect. aren't we all just lonely strangers screaming out into the dark to be comforted by our own echoes?

i think my partner/fiance/best friend/confidant and i have ... separated? broken up? had a falling out? what is the right phrase to use? "separated" doesn't quite make sense, since we've been apart (living on two coasts) for so long. "broken up" sounds stupid and juvenile (and thus, i realize, perfect), and "a falling out" doesn't seem to recognize the gravity of the situation. it's more than just a silly quarrel, it seems, even though that's how it started (how did it start? i can't trace the beginning, maybe it was all the way in the beginning), and now i feel seismically jolted out of what feels like the imagined reality of the last 5 years.

5 years is not a long time, but also a very long time. 5 years is 20% of my life, long enough to preserve vestiges of college, to encompass my first two "real-life' jobs, to contextualize my last 3 moves, to transition me from feeling young and indomitable and awesome to feeling old, insecure, scared and bewildered. 5 years is long enough to change what you believed about life, love, your future, goals, and the meaning of life. it's long enough to cultivate a fragile trust in another person, to believe that you really found an extension of yourself in a stranger, to start to think of life in the context of a dependable togetherness.

here is how crazy love is: you meet someone, a complete and utter stranger, and you actually tell them all the deep, dark, most terrible secrets you'd never even had the courage to utter aloud to yourself. you dance like an idiot in your underwear. you talk about your grossest, most humiliating bodily (mal)functions. you can honestly talk for the first time about your childhood, your parents, your fears and desires. you learn to cook better, you travel, you stay up late and sleep in, you go grocery shopping, you throw dinner parties, you protest in the streets, you dance, you sing karaoke badly. you devour life. you do things you would never have imagined doing, and you do silly inane things and find yourself enjoying them with a new sense of thrill. you feel yourself growing in ways you never thought possible, and the whole time, in total naked view of another person, a stranger.

so how do you reconcile yourself with losing something like that? it doesn't make much sense, do you grieve? blame yourself? get angry and upset at the other person for wasting your best years and treating you so cruelly in the final moments? maybe? or maybe you feel nothing at all, and this is what surprises you most. everything becomes a sort of dullness. the sharp sting of sadness, the bite of sudden loneliness, the burn of anger and the urge to fight, these were things that made sense before but now you can't even seem to muster them. it's like your heart burned so brightly and is now just burnt out. and it may burn that way again, but always in a lesser way. Said the Gramophone said it best when they wrote:

Every time you stop loving someone, your heart loses some of its blush. It vanishes. It's cancelled. & you wonder which of your feelings you'll no longer have the capacity to feel again. How much less am I, today, than I was yesterday? [from here]

alight on a rooftop with me, and let's nestle together and cast our gaze on the stars

lyrics for Andrew Bird's "Night Sky" (transcribed by me, as i listened to the mp3 below)

chorus:
sound is a wave, like a wave on the ocean
plays the ocean like a violin
pushing and pulling from shore to shore
biggest melody you never heard before

if i were the night sky (x2)
here's my lullaby
lullaby to the eve bye
if i were the night sky

verse 1:
what if we hadn't been born at the same time
what if you were 75 and i were 9
and i come visit you
bring you cookies in an old folks' home
would you be there alone?
when the late summer lightning fires off in your arms
will i remember to breathe?
you know i never will
if i could convince you that i mean you no harm
just wanna show you how not to need (/leave?)

what if i were the night sky?
here's my lullaby
lullaby to the eve bye
if i were the night

verse 2:
what if we hadn't been each other at the same time?
would you tell me all the stories from when you're young and in your prime
will i rock you to sleep
would you tell me all the secrets you don't need to keep
would i still miss you?
oh would you then
had been mine

chorus

[download mp3]

This American Life examines a Chinese life on the assembly line

EVERYONE NEEDS TO STOP WHAT THEY'RE DOING AND READ/LISTEN TO THIS RIGHT NOW.

what does it mean for something, everything to be “made in china?”

fascinating/horrifying revelations of the factories and working conditions in china that make all the shit you take for granted.

Shenzhen is a city without history. The people who live there will tell you that, because 31 years ago Shenzhen was a small town. It had little reed huts, little reed walkways between the huts. The men would fish in the late afternoon. I hear it was lovely. Today Shenzhen is a city of 14 million people. It is larger than New York City. Depending on how you count it, it's the third largest city in all of China. It is the place where almost all of your crap comes from.

And the most amazing thing is, almost no one in America knows its name. Isn't that remarkable that there's a city where almost all of our crap comes from, and no one knows its name? I mean, we think we do know where our crap comes from. We're not ignorant. We think our crap comes from China, right? Kind of a generalized way. China.

But it doesn't come from China. It comes from Shenzhen. It's a city. It's a place.

Shenzhen looks like Blade Runner threw up on itself. LEDs, neon, and 15-story-high video walls covered in ugly Chinese advertising. It's everything they promised us the future would be.

[...]31 years ago, when Deng Xiaoping carved this area off from the rest of China with a big red pen, he said, this will be the special economic zone. And he made a deal with the corporations. He said listen, use our people. Do whatever you want to our people. Just give us a modern China. And the corporations took that deal, and they squeezed and they squeezed. And what they got was the Shenzhen we find today.

i find it important to emphasize, that my absolute horror and disgust in reading this is less directed at the Chinese government and the Chinese leaders or even at the Chinese corporate heads who allow this condone this sick, sick operation (though, of course, they are fault here as well). what horrifies me and disgusts me most is actually the fact that American people are totally ok with/ ignorant of / willfully ignorant about it. we condone this kind of human rights abuse, because we want our crap to be cheaper, and we always want more of it.

think about how amazingly, completely backwards and effed up this is:

As a creature of the First World, I expect a factory making complex electronics will have the sound of machinery, but in a place where the cost of labor is effectively zero, anything that can be made by hand is made by hand. No matter how complex your electronics are, they are assembled by thousands and thousands of tiny little fingers working in concert. And in those vast spaces, the only sound is the sound of bodies in constant, unending motion.

modern technology has advanced to such a degree that we (Americans) assume most things  everything is made by machines, even the relatively simpler things that used to be made by hand, like sweaters, and books, even our food. most people probably think we live in the mechanized future, where handcrafted things are a luxury, a long-lost artifact of history and ancient cultures and the pioneers. so in an age of inconceivably advanced technology, where the machines get smaller and more complex and powerful year after year, you would expect these machines to also be borne from the labor and precision of machines. but, in fact, Mr. Disney tells us, they are assembled by hand, millions of precise hands, working repetitively in an unending mechanical whir. and, in fact, these millions of tiny hands are actually cheaper and more expendable than those big machines.

what makes that such a perverse and deplorable realization is compounded by the fact that those big expensive machines are what put people in America out of work. and here is where i get really angry: in America, where we have labor laws and unions and it's illegal to pay your workers nothing and have them work endless days, the big corporations figured it's actually cheaper and better for business to bring in those big machines. that's what happened in the coal industry, and the automobile industry, and many other industries: human labor got replaced with non-stop, wageless, liability-free machines. other corporations, who couldn't use machines (such as computer manufacturers, i guess), shipped the jobs overseas, to China and India, where they could get human hands to build their products and still get paid next to nothing.

and the really terrible thing is, that China's and India's wages keep dropping year after year, to "stay competitive" with one another in the international market for jobs. so you see, this is a compounding problem that grows worse year after year, with no foreseeable end, because the trend in dropping prices of tech products comes at the price of workers' wages and working conditions.

but, slave labor does not necessarily have to exist in order for these markets to exist. if American companies, such as Apple, commit to fair labor practices (as Apple just did, in joining the FLA), they set the standard for business practices around the world. if American companies demand ethical practices from their suppliers and partners, businesses and employers around the world will change to meet the demand. American companies and American consumers need to demand and expect better.

the dangerous cunning of internet scams

over the holidays, i was at home in kentucky eating lunch with my family, when we got a phone call. my brother, being the most spry of us at the table, jumped up and answered the phone. my brother, also being the most patient/naive of us at the table, listened to the automated message long enough to hear that whoever just called us had put us on hold, to wait for "the next available agent." my mom immediately grabbed the phone from him and hung up. everyone at the table chided him, "when you get calls from telemarketers, just hang up!"

but, this was one of several similar calls we'd gotten this week. at another point during the holidays, we got a call from "American Express" which i thought was a telemarketing call, so i hung up, but then i remembered that credit card companies sometimes make courtesy calls when strange or suspicious spending occurs on a credit card (i'm grateful to my credit card EVERY single time this happens, even the one time it was for $70 of groceries at Safeway). so, it being the holidays, i had a twinge of concern in the back of my mind and asked if my parents had checked their credit card activity lately. my mom, being a somewhat paranoid and worrisome person, immediately checked her wallet and my dad's wallet and freaked out that one of their AmEx cards was missing. she called American Express back to talk to someone to see if something suspicious had happened on their card because one was missing. 10 minutes later, we found the card (at the bottom of a purse or briefcase) and AmEx informed us they hadn't made a call to us in the last half hour.

but, because of this earlier incident, in which a potential telemarketing scam could have also been a potential credit-related courtesy call, my mom's curiosity was more piqued than it would otherwise be, and she called the-place-that-put-us-on-hold back and asked them who they were, why they called us, and if it was such an important matter, why they put us on hold. the person on the line then continued to inform her that i owed $400+ in debt to a hospital in LA for a visit occurring nearly 2 years ago. my mom was incredulous at first, then angry, argumentative, and lastly, she asked me if i knew anything about this. i thought it was preposterous, i had a string of freak medical emergencies about 2 years ago for a work-related health injury, but i had paid all my medical bills up front, out of pocket. i also had two different sets of insurance, my own medical insurance and workers' comp. so to have an outstanding debt of this size from over two years ago, and not hear anything about it until now, seemed wildly suspicious. worse, the man on the phone threatened that the issue had to be resolved TODAY.

luckily, my mom was in a hurry to go to yoga and told him he'd have to wait, and then just hung up. we didn't hear from them again. until a week later. they sent a letter to my house, which i didn't read or see because i wasn't home when my mom got it, but it freaked her out. from what i can tell though, from her reading it to me on skype, is that there are no details regarding the visit, what services or procedures incurred the debt, or even who the doctor(s) was/were that i saw. the letter said i had 30 days to write back to dispute it, otherwise they would assume i acknowledge a debt was owed and they would pursue it.

well, this afternoon, while i was sitting in the sun enjoying a post-lunch break with some reading, i received another call. again, the man on the phone was insistent that i needed to resolve the issue today. i told him, firmly, that i would not be doing ANYTHING today, i would not admit debt, would not resolve to pay them, would not speak to them further, until i obtained written documentation from them and the hospital with more details about the supposed outstanding bills and until they could tell me specifically where the charges were coming from. they couldn't even tell me what date the visit(s) occurred. the man on the phone said he wasn't a doctor and could not provide that information. i asked to speak to his manager, was put on hold for 10 minutes, and then i hung up because i thought it was ridiculous. they called me back another ten minutes later, but left no messages when i didn't answer.

this angers me so much because what the man on the phone is telling me is that the hospital i saw in LA "sold" my and others' medical files and bills to the collection agency he represents. isn't this a violation of HIPAA and patient confidentiality acts? if some third party company does in fact have access to my information (such as address, phone number) and was sold that information, i am pretty sure i have firm grounds to sue. 

well, i looked up their number online and found that others had received similar (unwarranted) phone calls and had filed complaints, indicating some suspicious, scammy behavior. i also called my insurance and workers comp representatives right away, and received notice from them that what this company is doing is ILLEGAL. according to my workers comp agent, discussions of debt or bills directly with patients (at least as it pertains to workers comp cases) is illegal, they should always go directly to insurance first. also, i should have received fair warning of this, even if i did not pay something, rather than hearing about it suddenly two years later.

my biggest problem with this is the predatory nature in which these kinds of calls are being placed. without having to do more than mention "debt" "collection" "credit report" in one sentence, they made my parents draw their own conclusions with a lack of evidence or data and had them fearing for their financial security. they immediately feared for their ruined credit scores, having all their assets seized, legal troubles that could easily be disappeared with a quick $400 payoff. this is the scary nature of scams these days: scammers can easily get you to leap to conclusions and be under their thumb, because the economy is so scary right now, everyone's trying to stay out of debt, and everyday people feel powerless and ill-prepared to challenge even the most dubious of financial crises or disputes. my parents thoughts immediately turned to "it will be easier to pay this now while it's still early than to try to delay it and incur litigation fees or penalties." but where's the proof? also, resolving a financial dispute over the phone immediately seems very strange to me.

furthermore, scams of this nature erode our sense of security and foster paranoia - how can we distinguish between a real scam and a legitimate call from my credit card or hospital? how will i know when i actually owe money and when i'm being taken for a ride? (answer: always keep really detailed and careful records of all your medical-related bills and large purchases, always make sure you pay on time - and keep records of debt repayment - and keep a rolodex of people at each agency or organization you use services from and their customer service lines. NEVER take anyone's word for it that you owe money and didn't know about it).

if you are similarly the victim of dubious medical bill-related calls, here is what you should do: tell them they should contact your insurance (but DO NOT provide any insurance phone numbers or plan data) and if they contact you further tell them their actions are illegal and you will report them to an accountability agency. then see if you can have their numbers blocked from your phone.

the point of this post is: in today's increasingly confusing and difficult to navigate digital world, information and misinformation are equally abundant and equally dangerous. scammers know that a lot of people are paranoid right now about issues related to money, and many don't know how to differentiate between legitimate companies and scams (for example: my dad opened a spam email from "Amazon" telling him my brother had purchased a $500 laptop computer, and then forwarded it to my whole family asking who bought the computer, before i told him to delete it immediately and not click any of the links because it was spam. you don't see a lot of "Nigerian prince" emails any more, all the spam is masked as notifications from companies you actually use - Viagara and Rolex being perhaps exceptions to the rule).

all that glitters is gold

ever since a friend told me about golden birthdays, when we were probably 7 or 8 years old, i've been sorta latently anticipating it, slowly building it into this Moment that would like, validate my life. like, i kept telling myself by the time of my 26th birthday, my golden birthday, that i will have figured my life out.

because 26, to a 7 or 8-year-old, seemed so old. and i remember wondering at the time what kind of person i would be in what seemed like such a distant future (2011 sounded futuristic in the early 90s). would i be married? would i have kids by then? what would i be doing? how tall would i be? would i still have the same friends and enjoy the same books, where would i live? would i finally have pets by the age of 26?

as a kid, i figured by the time i became a 26-year-old, by the time of my golden birthday, i would have my shit figured out. i would have grown out of insecurities and achieved some dreams of mine, that surely by 26, life would be a little less rocky, i'd be a little more sure of myself, i'd be, you know, an adult.

another thing: the reason, i think, i put so much emphasis on my golden birthday as a kid was because earlier in my childhood, one of my teachers at the Montessori school told our entire class during circle time about the Hale-Bopp comet. apparently, this amazing astronomical event, this once-in-a-lifetime event, had just occurred the previous night and i had totally missed it. what was i doing!? this knowledge, that i would be dead the next time Hale-Bopp passed into visibility, was just too tragic and agonizing for me to handle as a small child. i think i cried thinking about myself dead in the ground while a magnificent meteor passed overhead and me without the eyes to see it, and then maybe possibly i threw up a little on the inside. henceforth i took to staring a lot at the sun, even though my teachers and parents told me to look away, and stood outside once in the winter with my dad observing a lunar eclipse - i had just taken a shower and it was so cold outside that my hair froze stiff in a rolled bun on top of my head.

basically, my golden birthday was my personal Hale-Bopp comet. i knew i was only going to get one chance at this in my lifetime, and i'd better get it right.

but you know what? i thought what i wanted on my birthday was luxurious, extravagant celebrations, a gilded cake, to be swaddled in gold lurex and lame and parade around like a Macy's day float. but what it turned out i needed most was to spend my birthday with my family and allow myself to be reminded how wonderful small moments can feel and how these moments can erase all the uncertainty i have about my life. every little day is a Hale-Bopp, you know? and i'd rather live my life appreciating the beauty of a million everyday stars than lament forever one shooting star.

cubicle chronicles

i have started drawing at my desk as a way of coping with the feelings of horrible boredom and waste of my life's potential that comes with my job. it is also an excellent way of managing my anger and frustration and staving off my daily existential crises.

i like to "free draw," that is, i like to make random lines on a page and turn those into drawings. i like to think of it as "liberating" the drawings on the page. all this to say, i definitely don't consider myself a serious artist, and i don't know what i'm doing.

but the other day, i was drawing, and the drawing turned out to look a little/ a lot like me.

i gave her a mean stare (because this is how my face probably looks most of the time at work), combat boots and nunchucks, so she'd be tough and not stand crap from anybody (because most of the time at work i feel silenced and powerless). 

and then i decided to keep going with it, and i started making these comics. i put her in situations that bother me at work, like when people at the cubicle next to mine start clipping their nails at their desk, or when my supervisor who smokes and drinks lots of coffee decides to breathe into my face. soon i'll have her confronting the people at work who don't recycle, who talk really loud on their phones, who don't clean up the microwave. it's been surprisingly therapeutic. these are the drawings i've done so far (click to enlarge):

The Nail-Clipper

Coffee-Cigarette Breath

an important mystery has been solved!!!

over a month ago, i posted this tweet:

the foot in question greatly disturbed me, to an alarming degree; it created in me some nagging, paranoid fear of an expanding unknown natural world, a cruel, heartless world in which creepy-looking, unidentifiable feet are violently severed from their bodies and horrifically displayed in my work parking lot.

here is a crappy photo of a crappy cell phone photo of the aforementioned foot (i haven't figured out how to download photos off my cell yet, sorry). the poor quality of the photo greatly dilutes the creepiness of the foot; you cannot see, for instance, the bleached bone protruding from the scaly green flesh, the torn tendons, the little curvy nails, sharp and pointy at the ends of the toe pads. 

but, just as i'd forgotten about the foot, Ben and i went to Golden Gate Park and spent an afternoon hiking and walking around Stow Lake. there, by the water, to my great surprise, disgust and horror, i saw the feet again, this time walking towards me!

all around us, these strange birds i had never before seen. they were a weird cross between a chicken, a duck, and a lizard. they had small, fat black bodies, with weak-looking wings, white beaks, red eyes. and those feet! they looked like a strange chimera of chicken and an iguana. and they enjoyed coming close to us! we'd never seen birds like these before, and we were terrified.

well, tonight, i learned what they are! i found this book online, The Birds of Golden Gate Park, by Mailliard:

i had to look pretty hard, but finally, towards the end of the water fowl section, this description:

"Can be confused with no other Park bird"

"chicken-like"

"feet lobed, greenish"

yep, that's the bird! what we saw was a Coot, or mud-hen. also, that solves the mystery of the foot i saw in the parking lot of my work... but not how it got there. my guess, after watching the seagulls get hostile with the coots, is that maybe a seagull attacked one, ripped off its foot, and then carried the foot, in its beak, further inland, dropping it in the parking lot near my car. *shudders* nature can be strange.

further question: is this where the phrase "ya old coot!" comes from?

i mean, really, can anyone look at this and honestly tell me they are not creeped out!!?

aaaggggghhh the toes!

Black Friday is a disturbing reflection on our society, yes, but have you seen the Justin Bieber fragrance ads?

i hope all of you had a wonderful Thanksgiving (and for those who don't celebrate, i hope you had a peaceful Day of Mourning). i am personally extremely thankful for my family and friends and my physical health and well-being and clarity of mind. i'm especially grateful for the latter, as the day of giving thanks quickly gives way to the day of rabidly consuming everything in our paths.

Black Friday, truth be told, scares me shitless. never do i have less understanding or compassion for humanity than when i think of hoards of people trampling and ambushing each other in the malls for the sake of bargains and/or sport. it really is terrifying.

when people decide to camp out in a public square or park in the name of democracy, choose to care for each other, educate one another, engage in dialog, and live cooperatively, it is deemed a "health and/or safety hazard" and immediately pepper-sprayed or dismantled or demonized. but, when people choose to forgo family dinner to camp out in front of big box superstores the night before things go on mega sale, it's understandable? that makes no sense to me whatsoever.

on to other salient points: have any of you seen the Justin Bieber fragrance ads? i saw one for the first time a few months ago, when i was shopping for sweaters at the mall. 

what i simultaneously love and am repulsed by, is the oh-so transparent marketing scheme. the fragrance, obviously marketed to young teenage/tween-age girls of Bieber Nation, is being sold by the eponymous little pop tart Justin Bieber, who will make mega, un-godly bucks this holiday season peddling and inflicting this sugary sweet hormone juice on our unsuspecting populace.

what i love/hate about it is that there's no smidgen of pretense: Justin Bieber and his handlers/marketing machine know where the money is. of course they're not going to bother making a fragrance or aftershave for mini-dudes. the mondo money is with the itty-bitty ladies. so, of course, when i saw this ad for the first time at the mall, my initial thought was "hm, how weird, Justin Bieber made a fragrance for girls?" but of course he did!

and not only will it sell, it will sell like hot cakes (hot cakes with Justin Bieber's face on them, that then want to fuck you! those kinds of hot cakes!) because this is the precise thought process that goes into buying a bottle of Bieber's lady scent (so hilariously packaged in a bright pink blossoming flower):

it is not, as it would be with other celebrities who have fragrances (see: Britney, Gwen Stefani, J.Lo) "i want to smell like Bieber."

it is, "this is what i want to smell like if i want to be fucked by Bieber."*

and that is why i feel particularly depressed on this eve of Black Friday.


*additional thoughts: does the perfume actually smell like Bieber? does the perfume ostensibly attract Bieber to its wearer because he likes the smell of himself? or because it's the smell of money? 

11/11/11 11:11:11

so, did you do it?

luckily here at work, my desk phone clock, my computer, and my cell phone were all set a minute apart, so i got three consecutive shots at 11:11. i closed my eyes and gave thought to every single member of my family, thinking about the last time i saw them and what i will make sure to do the next time i see them again (give them long, powerful hugs, make sure to hold their hand and tell them how much i love them). for some reason, a lot of my thoughts turned to food - the last time i went hiking with my Uncle Donald and how he and his wife packed sandwiches for us on the hike and how sweet a gesture that was, thought about the last time i went to my grandma's house and my aunt Su Yuan made soup for everyone, and how i had a migraine that day and couldn't enjoy it as much as i wish i could have because it would have made her so happy, and i thought about the last time i went home for the holidays and visited my dad at his office one day and he offered me a little grape juice box from his office fridge, the way he's always done since i was a little kid.

and i thought about the warmth of a hug, how good it feels to hold someone you love close to you, and how every one of my family members' hands feels in my hand - my mom's hand is fat and soft and warm and strong, and my dad's is rough and dry but also somehow gentle and comforting, and my dad's mom's hands are papery white and wrinkled in delicate folds like tissue paper from a gift, and my mom's mom's hands are so much like my mom's that they are virtually hand twins, that i just know mine will be like that too one day.

and then i thought about Cal, my brother, and how i hope he's happy and i wonder what he's doing right now, and how when we were kids i did so much for him - i used to get all the other kids on the playground to help me plan a birthday party at recess for him, because his birthday was always during the school year and he was always jealous that mine was right after Christmas and everyone was home for my birthday. now that we're adults it's hard to be a big sister to him sometimes, but i'm going to go home this year and do something nice for him.

and finally i thought about myself. i've been really sad and negative lately, so i tried to imagine myself the way i used to be, the way i want to be, which is smiling, laughing, happy, face lit up with so many great ideas and a joy for life. if i can think it, maybe i can be it.

so in this magical minute that stretched into three, i counted my blessings, thought about my family and friends who are so far away, thought about the good things i've done and the good things still left in me to do. i thought about this moment, this small moment in the entire geological timeline of the earth's existence. i thought about time and how it's a construct and really has no meaning. but this moment, alive and awake in it as i was, was a gift, a fleeting gift i will never get back, so how can i spend it in the best possible way? who are all the people i want to imagine in this moment with me, even though they aren't here?

a minute (or two) of magical thinking

people who are close to me know that i am not religious and i'm maybe not even that spiritual, but dammit, do i believe in numerology*!

that's why tomorrow, 11/11/11, for the one minute of 11:11, i will concentrate all my energy into thinking just positive, well-intentioned, powerful, hopeful and generous thoughts. it's harder than it sounds. but for that one minute, i'll do it, and hope that you'll join me, and maybe magical and wonderful things will result (you've just spent a whole minute intentionally using your brain to generate positive vibes – that in itself is a good thing). you've got two shots at this (if you don't abide by the military way of telling time), so make them count**! 2 whole minutes of extraordinary positive energy being sent out into the universe by a bunch of people at once!

let's make brainwaves!
-stef


*in elementary school, probably for at least a solid year, if not more, i would make a wish/positive intention every day at 3:33 pm, and 12:34 if i caught it. seriously, a whole year. it was a year of magical thinking.

**seriously, i've already set my alarm for it.

learning a practice of love

when i was a teacher in Los Angeles, i had lots of students who were maladjusted to being at school, an environment that necessitated, sometimes forced, their interaction with a diversity of people, an environment that challenged them to try new things EVERY DAY, while possibly sitting next to someone they couldn't get along with, or even got along with too well. i learned more about human nature in my two years of teaching than i have learned my entire life.

one invaluable thing i learned was that everyone, from the teacher's pet to the disaster student who wreaks havoc on your classroom, is just seeking some validation. everyone needs solace in some redemptive quality in themselves. oftentimes, because we're too insecure and damaged from a history of neglect and emotional abuse. children are especially sensitive to every event in their lives, because these events are closer to the surface of memory, and because children use each moment to learn and adapt and adjust.  

the moment that changed my pedagogy life was when i did a functional behavior analysis (FBA) in my first year of teaching, as part of a grad school project. the FBA is basically a glorified checklist that you use to observe a student's behavior in an attempt to understand the purpose, indeed, the meaning, behind the behaviors. for my project, i chose my student Marvin, who had a range of bizarre behaviors that seemed to come out at random: he would frequently come disruptively late to class, get out of his seat and come to the front of the class to stand near me and mock my lessons, he would throw pencils at other students, he would sit at his desk with both fists in his mouth and his eyelids turned up in grotesque self-amusement, he would bark like a dog and scream and bang on his desk and stomp his feet and laugh maniacally at the hell he was raising. frequently, his behaviors were so disturbing i would react more out of fear than frustration. so, i followed him around one day, went to all his classes, armed with my FBA chart, on which i listed all his behaviors, and made checkmarks by them each time i saw them occur, and in what setting or following what types of stimulation. at the end of my observation, i was horrified to discover he only behaved this way in my class.

but after looking at my notes, i began to detect a pattern. Marvin had one of the lowest reading levels of any student i had in any of my special ed classes - he was barely above a kindergarten reading level despite being in the 6th grade. in all of his English classes, i noticed him being suspiciously quiet, almost unnoticeable. he only occasionally tapped a peer on the shoulder, or ripped at the edges of a textbook, but all while the teacher was turned around. Marvin was trying to avoid being noticed in the classes that would require reading, something he was bad at, insecure about, and ashamed to be exposed for. Marvin was, however, strong in math. in fact, he was one of the strongest in my special ed class. he was quick, usually accurate, and excited. he was almost always the first one done, the first to raise his hand, and then the first to freak out if i didn't call on him (which i tried not to do ALL the time, in order to give other students a chance). i then considered my math class, and the way i usually conducted them - short group teaching, individual practice, followed by a review of answers and more practice*. it became painfully clear to me that Marvin's disturbing behaviors were not completely his fault, he was trying, in the only way he knew how, to get my attention for something - maybe the one thing - he did right and was proud of.

the reason this changed my life, you see, is because it revealed a fallacy of an unexamined assumption. we're told, or assume, that people who act unreasonably or irrationally are just weird and/or crazy, and should be ignored (at best), shunned, or reprimanded. never are we told to reach out to these people, to embrace them, and try to understand them. when i realized that Marvin was just seeking my attention for something he felt proud of (granted, in the worst ways imaginable), all i had to do was give him a little bit of my time every day to listen to him, applaud his accomplishments, and give him validation in an otherwise unforgiving and indifferent world. it was so simple, and yet, so revolutionary, because it goes against everything else we're told in our culture.

what we have to understand is that people behave in strange ways all the time. sometimes words are not enough to give voice to deeper longings, or are too hard to say. sometimes you give someone a gift, because you don't know how else to say you're sorry. or you reach out to touch someone's hand, just to let them know you're so happy they're alive. our culture can be so isolating that we forget how to talk to one another, and when we make efforts to reach out to another human being, it feels revolutionary.

learning to see through Marvin's destructive behaviors and understand what he was trying to say by them, helped me move away from blame-placing, to a more compassionate, understanding, and forgiving approach to my interactions with others. it's not always easy to practice, heck, it's not always easy to remember, but trying to hold in my head and heart the conviction that all people are, like me, struggling to be loved and make meaning out of their lives, and the least i/you/we can do to make a difference is to love a little back.

The toughest thing is to love somebody who has done something mean to you — especially when that somebody is yourself. Look inside yourself and find that loving part of you. Take good care of that part because it helps you love your neighbor. --Fred Rogers

*the lecture-style, banking model of teaching is an obvious first-year teaching mistake. the problem is it's so common and assumed that even this critical pedagog was fooled into thinking it would work! in my second year, i greatly improved my pedagogy by adopting a student-centered, rather than teacher-centered, method of instruction. i still gave mini-lectures, but incorporated multiple manners of student engagement and participation, even though my mini-lectures were only about 10 minutes long. i worked my butt off trying out activities, and inventing new ones, and the best idea i ever had: allowing students to work cooperatively to solve problems together. wow, what a difference a year of mistakes makes! in my second year, all my students were OVERJOYED to come to class, i never had anyone be late, and my second-year Marvin, a girl who was, of course, named Angel and had a predilection for animal print hoodies, never derailed my class (despite running around the room stomping her feet and clawing the desks and grunting) because my other students were enthralled with my lessons, loved what they were learning, and didn't want to stop. the best part of this story is that the culture of learning and positivity in my class was so strong that Angel eventually realized the best way for her to get attention in class was to do well in class. i succeeded in turning her around bit by bit, but issues Angel had in another class caused her to get expelled from school.

free falling

I opened my laptop this morning to check the weather, and this is what I saw.

I fell asleep watching the documentary Transcendent Man, about Raymond Kurzweil. I highly recommend it, fascinating and alternately dark and hopeful. Funnily, I was watching it last night because after watching two episodes of Breaking Bad, Season 4 back-to-back, I was too scared to sleep. Somehow, dystopian robot futures were calming after watching normal humans break down into remorseless criminals.

a scientific inquiry into the varying experience of sunsets over time

Some data:
The sunset time for Fremont, CA (94538) for today, Wednesday Nov. 9, 2011, is 5:01 pm PST.
The sunset time for Los Angeles, CA (90034) is 4:53 pm PST.
The sunset time for Syracuse, NY (13203) is 4:46 pm EST.
The sun sets in Oxford, OH (45056) at 5:28 pm EST.
In Lexington, KY (40512), the sun sets at 5:31 pm EST.
And in Miami, FL (33101), it's 5:34 pm EST.

I'm sure there's a scientific explanation for the variance, like the earth's tilt on its axis and the rotation in relation to the sun, but I'm going to leave it to more scientifically-inclined minds than mine to furnish those reasons. (Did you see how I gave zip codes instead of latitudes and longitudes, which would have proved infinitely more useful in answering this question? Although I did try to arrange those cities in order from North to South.)


All I know is, it gets dark disgustingly early now, and I was correct in thinking that, when growing up in the Midwest, the falls were never so dark, nor the days so short (and unfulfilled) as they are on the west coast. It was not just nostalgia playing a dirty mind trick on me.

A Letter to The Occupy Movement

To my compatriots and comrades in the Occupy Movements Everywhere:

I am writing this out of urgency, and a desperate desire for the 99% to succeed in bringing about the changes our world needs. I've been following the growth of the movement with great interest and enthusiasm, although I must admit my frustration is growing with each passing day. I do not agree with the detractors who say The Movement needs a solid list of demands or a "clear" message, because the issues and problems which the Occupy Movement illuminates are too numerous and varied to pinpoint, and besides, I am glad the Occupy Movement has refused to be limited in its scope and wanting.

I am writing today, not to request any clarity or focus in message, but in action. I believe The Occupy Movement has the power and potential to transform our society, if we put our collective weight behind decisive action. And now is the crucial time.

The Occupation Movement is about to come up against two of the greatest momentum-killers: 1) institutional recess and 2) desensitization. Both of these are issues of time.
The first is a problem familiar to student organizers: you've worked so hard to build your movement and mount pressure on your target, only to find yourself with only a few days or weeks before Spring Break/Winter Break/Summer vacation. Often, in these cases, administrations just have to play a waiting game before the student organizers all go home and the rest of the student population forgets what happened. When the students return from vacation, they have to start all over, trying to build enough momentum to push through their demands before the next vacation hits. It's the same with congressional recesses and politics, too. There is always a built-in timeline, whether institutionally situated or not, that dictates the rhythm of actions. In the case of the Occupy Wall Street movement, we have about 2-3 weeks, at most, before the harsh New York winter hits. At that point, what happens to The Movement? Even if OWS decides to continue camping in Zuccotti Park, there is a question of purpose. Is the point of the Occupy Movement to camp together in public spaces indefinitely? What does it achieve in doing so?

That brings us to the next problem, which is desensitization. Right now, the Occupy Movement has newness and the spectacular as advantages. A social movement of this size and diversity has never been seen, possibly, since the beginning of modern society. The Movement has the media and people around the world in rapt attention because it's new, it's exciting, and it's all of us (we are the 99%). But how long will this last? My guess is: not very long. Unfortunately, we live in a society that is extremely short of attention span. And one that is easily bored and desensitized. Which is to say that the longer this goes on, the smaller our window of opportunity for change becomes. We cannot afford to let something of such importance be forgotten or dismissed as a fad. We must harness the power and potential of this movement, while public interest and opinion still remain strong are still growing, to make something daringly transformative happen.

Malcolm Gladwell touches on the importance of swift action in his article for the New Yorker, "How David Beats Goliath" (May 11, 2009):

“And it happened as the Philistine arose and was drawing near David that David hastened and ran out from the lines toward the Philistine,” the Bible says. “And he reached his hand into the pouch and took from there a stone and slung it and struck the Philistine in his forehead.” The second sentence—the slingshot part—is what made David famous. But the first sentence matters just as much. David broke the rhythm of the encounter. He speeded it up. “The sudden astonishment when David sprints forward must have frozen Goliath, making him a better target,” the poet and critic Robert Pinsky writes in “The Life of David.” Pinsky calls David a “point guard ready to flick the basketball here or there.” David pressed. That’s what Davids do when they want to beat Goliaths. [emphases mine]

If we want to win, if the Occupation Movement is going to amount to some everlasting change, we need to act quickly.

The greatest advantage The Occupy Movement has in its arsenal is the power of the people. The Movement has been exercising this power (as in the frequent use of The People's Mic), but rarely applying it. We are the 99%, are we not? What we lack in material and economic wealth we make up for in human capital. We can overwhelm and overpower the 1% if we remember to act in unison. The 1% needs the 99%, not the other way around. And that is the source of our power.

I propose that we start direct actions targeted at the 1%. For example, what if the Occupy Movements decided to unanimously boycott companies owned or affiliated with the 1%? The misconception has always been that the 1% determines the health and strength of our economy. The truth, however, as we all know, is that it's the individual consumer and taxpayer who actually contributes to society, that it's our money that goes towards bailouts, and it's our money that goes into the stock market. I propose that Occupy Wall Street make a large banner, "Boycott of the Week! This Week, the 99% Boycotts: _____________" and fly it in Zuccotti Park, and that other Occupy sites do the same, and then watch as the 99% proceed to withdraw their money from said bank, or stop buying said brand, or sell said stock. Imagine the dips the market will take, and the blows to the fat cats' pocket books! If the 1% was mostly ignoring us before, we will force them to listen to us now.

We must continue to push and build pressure on our targets and find a way to win our government and economy back.

We are too big to fail, and this is too important to be ignored.

Onward, the 99%!

-stephan!e

Occupy Wall Street newcomers

"...and then, there were Ben Kuebrich and Stephanie Lee."

ben and i made the local NBC NYC news*, for showing up last friday to check out the amazing happenings at the Occupy Wall Street movement. more on that soon!

View more videos at: http://nbcnewyork.com.


*the only reason we found out was because we met a guy on the way home who stopped us to chat and said "hey! you're the ones from the 6 o'clock news!" 

rabbit habits

my roommate found a domestic rabbit the other day, and has been keeping it outside under a laundry hamper with a phone book on top. i didn't find out about it until this morning, but i'm concerned for its health and safety - there are stray cats in our neighborhood - and i'm wondering if its quality of life isn't what it should be.

the moment i heard she had found, and was keeping, a rabbit, i got scared, remembering the wild baby birds my brother and i used to find as kids and try to keep as pets - tried to "save" - only to have them die within a a night or two. i suspect wild animals, or any animal for that matter, knows when it's being held captive in an unnatural state. i think domestic animals are less aware, though, because of their upbringing and ways of life and force of habit. habits are something we impose on our animals that would be against their nature and better interests, for habits are something that are evolutionarily disadvantaging. (habits make us comfortable in otherwise potentially adverse situations and give us the illusion of control over situations, they dull our awareness to changes in our environment and make us assume constancy in our lives that doesn't exist.) i even suspect that animals can get depressed and will themselves to die when they find themselves in such situations of captivity. when my brother and i tried to rescue a baby robin that had fallen out of its nest, we gave it a large box with a cloth and dry grass bed, and lots of water and birdseed, but it died the next day. i remember feeling sick to my stomach when my parents explained it needed its mom, and thinking that maybe if we'd left it outside, the mom wouldn't have been scared away and returned for her baby. i was maybe 6 or 7 at the time, but i remember thinking to myself that i'd learned an important lesson, that i think still influences me to this day: that nature can take care of itself, if humans can prevent themselves from interfering. basically, i think the world and all its animals would be better off if humans had never made efforts to control and dominate and use it, and endeavored instead to coexist in it.

so i'm conflicted. this little rabbit is trapped and i don't know how to free her. what does freedom mean for a domestic rabbit? while i can't just let her go in the woods - i suspect she'd be eaten by coyotes or an owl within a few days - i can't just let her stay in what can only be called a death trap, waiting for a flood or a carbon monoxide leak (my roommate wants to keep her in the garage!) or a stray cat to come and kill her. i want her to have the best quality of life possible, but i don't know how to give that to her, and what that means.

furthermore, it's really distressing to me because of the symbolic importance i've placed on this rabbit in the last few hours. i think about all the wild animals killed by human (in)action and interference (the animals i see everyday on the roads, the beautiful red fox i saw the other day, the first red fox i'd ever seen in my life so close, its tail blowing up in the wind, for a moment it looked like it could have just been sleeping, i had to pull my car over and call ben to cry, i was so upset), and think about the animals i've tried to save without success (the baby birds, the mauled chipmunk i should have just let die by the paws of a menacing neighbor's cat), and i think to myself, if i could just save this one animal, just this one, i could make it all better. i could stop having nightmares and feel some relief.

also, i sympathize with her. living in cramped quarters, with little view of the outside world, and in vulnerability of predators is a shitty way to live. my life has felt that way lately, like a trap, and i think that, deep down, i'd like to save this rabbit so i can feel a little saved myself.

UPDATE: and then, of course, this had to happen today in Ohio. (some idiot who had been keeping 50 exotic animals in his yard, decided to set them loose before committing suicide. local law enforcement decided it was the "right thing to do" to hunt them all down, and kill them. freakin' ridiculous. fyi, i believe in cosmic justice, and i hope that every human who hunts animals for sport spends their afterlife as a factory chicken. have i mentioned i'm unwaveringly pro-fauna?)

RIP, Steve Jobs

here in Silicon Valley, the news of Steve Jobs's passing hit us all like an earthquake. ripples and jolts of shock and dismay. the news of his death coming only a few weeks after the shock of his resignation as CEO, due to his ailing health.

i know very little of what Steve Jobs was like as a man, but i know he changed our world and the way we lived in it with the power of his ideas. there are traces of his influence all around us, whether we like it or not, and his presence in so many aspects of our modern world make it impossible to not feel impacted by the fact that even such a brilliant and valuable man did not receive the care he needed to overcome cancer. with all that Jobs and his team were able to do and accomplish with him at the helm, it's viciously cruel that he would die so young (only 56) from cancer. whether you're a Mac or PC, it's terribly sad.

just think: as the news is breaking, thousands upon thousands of internet users are taking to their smart phones, their iPads, their Macs (and all the derivative devices thereof), and tweeting, video conferencing, posting to facebook, blogging, etc. all of those actions were touched, influenced, and forever changed by this man and his ideas.

RIP, Steve. and thanks for everything.

Steve Jobs, "How to live before you die."