Buddhist Marketer

Mazel tov, yes?

I want to congratulate the talented, thoughtful, creative, and deeply kind human also known as Lilit Marcus, also known as founder of the Save The Assistants phenomenon, also known as the brand new editor of Jewcy.com.

I am proud to know this old soul housed in the lithe bod of a young woman. When she has her own assistant perhaps she’ll let me house-sit.

I’ll refrain from asking her about the content management system upon which Jewcy.com is built for at least five more business days.

Congratulations, Lilit!

Leica’s digital SLR

A homeless man once reported to a photographer I dated many years ago that a camera lens was like a woman’s girl-parts:  it was the most important element and demanded to be cherished and respected.  Maybe also he was trying to differentiate cross-dressing cammy-ras from actual cammy-ras.  Not quite sure about his train of thought there but he concluded by noting that Leica lenses were by far the best girl-parts in the business.  The video footage of this homeless man’s knowledge-dropping struck me, not only for its poetic lunacy, but also because prior to that I’d never heard of Leica.

So Leica’s got a digital SLR and one of my favorite features of Flickr is that you can sniff around and see actual pictures that actual humans are taking with actual cammyras.  So, for example, I ama-churlish-ly shoot with a Nikon D70, a camera that the makers of comparison charts refer to as pro-sumer (professional / consumer hybrid (hybrid vigor!)) digital SLR (single lens reflex, which according to me means it has a cylindrical lens that you can put your mitts on and focus yourself and stuff).

There’s currently a pretty good deal on the Leica V-Lux-1 10 Megapixel Digital Camera at J&R Music World (rebate, free shipping), which not only shoots stills but also video (mine does not).  But do I like its work product, if you will?

I moseyed on over to Flickr and used their camera finder tool to discover actual pictures shot with this camera.  Unfortunately, the photographers’ permissions do not permit me to post the ones I liked best within my blog, but here are links to two that caught my eye:

• Sparklers, a body of water, and a duck
• Young man on a train

I’m not sure if it’s my eyeballs, but I’m not dazzled by any of the photographs.  If the most interesting photographs across all Flickr users by the Leica are less compelling to me than photos that I’ve taken with my Nikon, then that’s probably a strong signal that I should stick with my current machine.

Yes? No? Maybe?

Anyhoo this entire line of thinking is entirely academic given my impecunity and larger fish that beg a fryin’.

Ominous clouds for Travelocity

If I were priceline or Travelocity or Mobissimo or Expedia I’d be eyeballin’ Google Maps with a bit of trepidation.  What’s to stop them from adding cheapest and quickest airfare routes between destination A and destination B?

Google Maps is already the death knell of HopStop.

What’s your Google strategy?

Inelasticity of self

I had an eight hour conversation yesterday with an M&A veteran who has made me question my desire to become a scholar.

“Don’t confuse your unhappiness with being a major with a lack of desire to fight the battle.  You have passion for the war.  This is a good thing.  But you are meant to be a general.”

Oh, ouch! The truth.  How often have I considered the people above me on the food chain to be total morons?  “I could run this business better than they can,” I would tell myself, scanning their grammatical errors on a powerpoint and critiquing their presentation skills let alone ability to select an outfit.

“Your subject matter expertise in internet technologies, your intelligence, your presence, your credentials:  you would have venture capital and private equity firms slaughtering each other trying to get you.”

I like how this sounds, I think.  Suddenly the infinity pool, the last-minute trip to Zanzibar, the closet dripping with haber-dashingly badass suits reappear on the set of What Anittah’s Life Could Look Like.  I did always like badinaging with c-levels over dinner.  There always has been a part of me that very much enjoys the politicking that happens amongst smart, confident people in the upper echelons of corporate America.

But it was taking me too long to get there, and I was exhausted by the politicking amongst all the mediocre, one-dimensional people on the B-list.

“This PhD business is just a cop-out.  Go get a JD/MBA, and only from Harvard or Stanford.  You’ll have three summers to intern.  Do one at Kleiner Perkins, one in M&A at Goldman — and demand M&A, none of that other bullsh– and maybe at a law firm working on a deal one summer to see that side of things.  Work for five years in M&A and mark my words, you’ll be a general.  You will be the CEO or, worst-case scenario, a chief strategy officer.  Or if you prefer, you’ll be a vc or at a private equity company and you’ll tell your portfolio how to run their businesses.  Believe me, if you were running [large .com], you’d have done a much better job than [well-known CEO].  And I’d say that in front of [person in question]; [he/she] is a friend of mine.

“You have what it takes.  You are smart and passionate with presence and credibility.  You care deeply about the war.  And let me tell you something else –”

Good God, there’s more? I think, scrambling in my head and fighting the idea of having to take the damned LSAT and GMAT –

“No one who has been truly successful has been without insecurity.  Self-contentment is the enemy of productivity and drive.”

This is not a conversation that my personal coach would be happy about, I think to myself, taking a hungry gulp of my Egyptian lemonade.

===

A few years ago I was on a sixth or seventh date with a very curious human being.  He was one of those people that I had to date from a cultural-anthropology perspective.  I collected data and played the part that he clearly wanted me to play:  that of an insipid and happy white woman with blonde hair.  And it was very clear that actual talking would not be on the agenda:  he spent tens of thousands of dollars on a sound system in order to listen to pop music. Audiophilic for Casey Kasem’s Top 40?  Really?

One night, as usual and per his request, I’d worn the kind of outfit that, as I glided through the dining room, made men stop mid-sentence or -chew despite the searing glances from their companions.  An entire table of bankers went silent as I walked by.  During dinner in our snuggly corner booth, I’m in character and giggling at one of his inanities.

“Oh, you’re such a happy little thing,” the set of beautiful new teeth that he paid dearly for said to me.

Oh my God, I thought to myself.  This man has no idea who I am. He’s been completely snowed into thinking that the woman he’s requested I be is actually me.

===

Writes Ann Foerst, former theologian and research scientist at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, in the May-June 2008 Spirituality & Health’s “The Real Reason For Sex“:

… what makes humans unique among living creatures is that we are constantly telling stories about who we are, what we’re doing, and what we should be doing.

===

Have I not worked incredibly hard and travelled this far on my journey to get out of the business of aligning my activities towards the goals and interests of the Other?

Is not the whole point of guild membership the ability and freedom to pursue a course of action and line of inquiry that is relatively unfettered by the needs of outside parties?

“Oh, I have no doubt that if you go into academia, you’ll have a flurry of productivity and become the president of a top university if you want by the age of fifty.  But you will grow bored.  Universities are very slow to change, and you are temperamentally impatient.  But the other path means that by the age of fifty you’ll be worth $100MM.  Mark my words.”

===

Matty Charles & The Valentines’ Mama, I Don’t Want To Go Insane just started playing on my iTunes:

I’ve been looking for an answer / in every drop of wine / and the whiskey shines like gold / but there’s no way / it could ever keep my heart from feeling lonely all the time / oh mama I don’t want to go insane

===

Being confronted with a difficult juncture such as the one that, prior to yesterday, I was unawares existed, makes me feel like this:

===

This from my old man this morning: “There was this farmer, see, and I always liked how straight his rows here.  Always admired that, corn neat and orderly far as the eye — anyway.  So I asked him how he did it, and he says, he says, ‘Well, I just look off into the distance at a far tree, and I point my tractor in that direction.  And if I do that, I won’t be able to help it, I’ll stay on course, and my rows’ll be straight.’”

===

For those of us with zscores > three, paths forged by those who have come before are unlikely to suffice, yes?  And anyway:  I have been in the service of other people my entire life.  Meeting their needs.  Being who they want me to be.  This happy little thing is tired of it.

Anittah, Are You Being Served?

If I decide to chase a hundred-million-dollar-dream, the likelihood of me serving me gets closer and closer to zero.

ANPhD:  game very much still on.

Ambivalence + 2

I started drafting this post on August 3rd and haven’t finished it yet, so here.

One more robot learns to be something more than
A machine - when it tries the way it does - make it seem
Like it can love -

The Flaming Lips’ One More Robot / Sympathy 3000-21

Earlier in The Ambivalence Series:

My first inclination is a deep feeling of ambivalence, of not being sure if I would even feel sad if he were to die. In a way it would be a nice closure, at last, for an abrupt ending for which I never received a reason, even a lame one.

But this can’t be right, can it? What kind of a crum-dum isn’t sure whether or not she cares if a man she once thought she loved croaks from cancer?

Maybe I am that crum-dum. Only one way to find out.

Equations.

This from my 7/10/2008 post, Ambivalence: the math, which is followed by:

I get out my list of events and assign two numbers to each entry: one number for giddiness and one number for grumpiness. I try to keep to a max value of 1 for either column, but, let’s be honest:

1. I am female
2. This is my chart and I am the boss

As I think of the values, I try and think, “How did I feel at the time the event happened?”

from my 7/14/2008 post, Ambivalence +1.

So, here I am with my table of data. I consider normalizing any event that contains a rating (giddy or grumpy) >1 such that the max value = 1.

“No,” I decide. “Hormones is hormones.”

What I never consider is simply adding the positive column and comparing its sum to the negative column. That would just be silly.

I know myself well enough to know that additional data points shape all previous data points. Which is to say, memories of the first date were that much brighter after the second date, which had a (+,-) of (0.6, 0). It’s as if each new event were squares of colored cellophane stacked on a light box, and as the relationship unfolded, so too did the cumulative hue of affection.

“Let’s get down to brass tacks,” I tell myself. I’m in the office, off the clock, and it’s late enough that the building’s air conditioning has clicked off. I’m undaunted. I’ve got feelings to crunch.

So, here’s the question. I know the cumulative affection rating is not simply additive. The most recent event is the event that has the most powerful impact on the running “How do I feel about this person?”

But how much more important (in terms of overall affection) is the most recent event versus all the events that have preceded it?

It’s exponential, I decide. I click over and look for basic parabola equations. (Remember those?) I find a Wikipedia entry on exponential weighting and find a smoothing function. “Could this be what I need?” I wonder.

What I want is an equation that describes this … (may or may not be continued)

America-lovers shop at Bath & Body Works

I’ve been on the hunt for a soft, medium-weight, simple robe to wear over the silk chemises I started indulging in after watching Repulsion starring Catherine Deneuve.

My $28 poly-satin number from Pearl River Mart, while color-coordinated with my bedroom, clung to her chemical-y scent that no cycle of washings or spritzing with Febreze could shake.

Plus, it didn’t match my dusty rose chemise, wasn’t particularly warm, and had a tendency to get static-y.

Imagine my delight, then, after having been evilly lured into a Bath & Body Works by my Achilles heel also known as a stuffed sheep, to discover a deliciously soft cashmere-y gray knit robe for $50.

5% cashmere, it matches all my nightgowns (even the $15 Vision in Thistle from Sears), and I was able to get a few cross-subsidizing lambies (a largesse I’m partially redistributing to one lucky reader chosen at non-random).

So, for those of you who are in the market for an autumn robe-thingy, the purchase of which will prove your patriotism and demonstrate that you are with us, I’d just like to recommend trotting over to Bath & Body Works, purveyor of mediocre lotions & sprays and fantastic stuffed animals & robe-thingies.

Signals

What kind of message does an academic department send when it decides to use the ole’ Comic font for its 2008 Fall Semester course listing?

Is it saying, “I’m so contrarian; down with the LaTeX hegemony”?

Wait, what’s that you say?

Oh, it’s saying — wait, what?

Oh, right.  Sure, sure.  I got it.

The comic font’s saying, “Anittah, if you hadn’t already struck me off your list of vaguely-possible doctoral programs, then thanks to this flagrant full font-al equivalent of Joe Plumber Bum-Crack, you’ll definitely be activating the ole’ strike-through feature on at least one row of data in that there DrANP.xls file.”

===

In other news, I got a 790 on the math portion of the last-standardized-test-I’ll-ever-take-unless-McCain-gets-elected-and-I-have-to-take-a-test-for-Aruban-citizenship GRE.  It’s not an 8,o0o, but still.  Like so many non-communist markets, it doesn’t suck.  And the signal I’m sending by telling you that is, “Despite my bombastic exterior I am but a fragile bunny on the inside who just wants to be loved and knows only performance as the way in which to gain affection.”  And for a 1500 I think you owe me a hug (or a birthday gift; stay tuned for your instruction manual).

xoxo to all you Cantab sociologists!

Happy birthday Luigi

My li’l bruvver turns 27 today!

He is married with two stepsons, lives in a nice big house in the northern ‘burbs of Chicago, and drives a Corvette.

I sleep on a twin bed.

I FLIP THE BOARD!

Love you, Danny.   xoxoxo

Rewarding addictive behavior

In which I use italics willy-nilly and try to figure out at what point good becomes bad

Kara Richardson Whitely, in “Reaching my peak” in the October 2008 issue of Self magazine, writes, bolding mine:

For a long time, I used food — and by extension fat — to insulate myself against all the bad things:  my parents’ divorce when I was 9, the family friend who molested me at age 12, the countless people who sorrowfully told me I had “such a pretty face.” …

I ate, pushing Little Debbie Zebra Cakes

(I’m more of a Donut Stick girl myself, or when available, Zingers, yum!)

into my mouth until I’d finished a box of 10 in a sitting…

I felt suspended between my desire to lose weight and my seeming inability to do anything about it…  I’d go to Weight Watchers, then swing by McDonald’s on the way home.  As my weight yo-yoed between 300 and 335, I felt frightened of what would happen if I lost more.  What would I do without the security blanket that had comforted me for so long?

Indeed.

Kara’s not the only one with an addictive behavior (you’ll have to read her full piece to know what happens; I don’t want to rob you after all), but her addictive behavior is pooh-poohed by society.  What about those of us who engage in self-soothing
behaviors that society rewards?

to insulate myself against all the bad things

I remember a specific moment during my writing class this summer, an intimate group of half a dozen women from our mid-twenties to late seventies, guided by the very awesome and highly recommended Elaine Edelman.  One woman had just finished reading her draft of a piece that closed with her, as a young girl, turning to the pages of a book immediately after being molested (by the teenage son of family friends as her mother chatted with his in the kitchen) (!!!).

“How heartbreaking,” one sixty-something woman responded, “that the girl immediately numbs herself with a book.”

I was nodding vigorously, thinking of my own public library denizen status as a young girl, and it was as if a lightbulb went off in the author’s head.  “Oh my,” this woman in her late seventies uttered quietly.  “I never made that connection.”

And why should she have?  We applaud reading, we give you Pizza Hut Personal Pan Pizzas if you read a quota within a month, we remind you that reading is fundamental, and Levar Burton takes the banana comb out from in front of his eyeballs and devotes rainbows to the act.  Reading teaches you things and makes you smarter and we like smarts, so read!

But at what point is reading an escape mechanism?  At what t=bad does reading get in the way of, rather than contribute to, a happiness-optimized existence? Is there ever any way to tell when swimming into pages of black and white text has become the equivalent of jamming black and white striped cakes into your gaping maw?

Reading isn’t the only possibly-addictive behavior that our society rewards. I used to crank 90 hour weeks while taking two MBA classes, commuting 70 minutes each way, getting clobbered weekly by my best friend and her law school roommate in Scrabble, and running the national not-for-profit that I started.  Without even noticing. It would’ve been unthinkable for me to consider that I was cramming activities onto my plate as a way to escape myself — because I was wholly unawarez who and/or where this alleged self of mine was. Working long hours meant I rose up the ladder (and pay grade) quickly; getting an advanced degree was what you did as A Smart Person, and of course I was going to keep on running the organization that landed my name in the press. Duh. I mean, how could any of that stuff be bad? It’s not like I had track marks up my inner arms. Quite the contrary. Society was cheering me on.

And society cheers a lot of people on, encourages their addictive behavior.  “We’re a nation of consumers, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” coos an awful, terrible, very bad no-good Discover Card advertisement.  We’re proud when we’re workaholics.  We applaud industrious entrepreneurs.  And it’s a lot easier to go for that hit of instant gratification approval than take a moment to slow down, pause, and feel the twinkly warmth that comes from “little” things.

Like a warm hug from a friend.

The twinkle in the eye of a toddler.

The mesmerizing way the late afternoon sunshine floats through your curtains and twirls through the dust in the air.

===

Last year I broke with tradition and brought my old man with me to the Yale Medal Dinner.  One of the recipients was none other than John Pepper 6Y0, former CEO of Procter & Gamble.  As President Levin announced the award, he also noted that an entire table was here to support Mr. Pepper.  What loyalty this man inspires!  They all stood up and continued to applaud Mr. Pepper, one of the newest Yale Medal recipients.  We all applauded, clap clap, clap clap.  The men, President Levin reported, were primarily comprised of his direct reports and close colleagues at P&G.

I looked around for a woman I ran track with, albeit briefly, during my freshman year. I wove my head and searched the tables near the dozen men who were standing and cheering on their man Pepper. I was hoping to catch her afterwards, say hello, catch up. I didn’t see her or anyone else that she might have been with (for example, her mom).

This surprised me, seeing as she’s his daughter.

It’s not easy to be there for your kids (I surmise) especially when they’re snarly-lipped teens.  But medal-givers and paycheck-signers and the lovely pages of books that don’t talk back and the warm gooey wonderfulness of food food food –

===

Oh dear, how I love to write.  Oh my oh my oh my

Is ethical behavior impossible?

I’m watching this thing about Jimmy Carter on PBS and I’m thinkin’ about how hard it is to know what’s “right”.  I mean, you surround yourself with a dominant status quo and boy it’s mighty hard to avoid head-nodding, if only to blend.  I’m not going to lie:  I went roller skating on Thursday nights with the Church of Christ as a kid and sang along to

Oh you can’t get to heaven
Oh you can’t get to heaven
In Anittah’s shoes
In Anittah’s shoes
Oh you can’t get to heaven
In Anittah’s shoe-oe-oes
Oh you can’t get to heaven in Anittah’s shoes
God don’t want no big canoes
All my sins been washed away
I’ve been redeemed

It took me a few roller skating trips to figure out what the hell they were singing in those last coupla lines and I never really knew what they meant until my early twenties.

Anyhoo, as a society we lurch towards the ethical like a kid trying to learn how to drive stick.  It’s messy stuff, this whole social-animal business.  We stroke our chins, give it our best shot to come up with policies that aren’t evil, and roll the dice.  People in the South must’ve been irked to beat hell when the ruling came down from the Supreme Court that segregation was a no-good very bad way in which to treat schoolkids.  What right did these over-educated elitist shits from the Northeastern Seaboard have to march into their hometowns, fling open the doors to their elementary schools, and start nosin’ around and tellin’ ‘em what to do?

So, this is rattling around in my head when I start sorting through a pile of Things That I Found Interesting One Day And Tore Out With The Intention Of Eventually Blogging in my living room (which, as of Saturday night, is my bedroom again). (Are you there, Brian?  It’s me, Anittah.) And while the Supreme Court made what I feel was a good call at the time (though, on the issue of forced bussing — well, let’s just say that my concerns about education could fill up an entire blog on their lonesome), shits from the Northeastern Seaboard haven’t always made decisions that stand the test of time.

From “Kill the Indian to Save the Man” from the August 1-7, 2008 RiseUp insert to the New York Daily News:

The American Indian boarding school era began in the late 19th century during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant.  Boarding schools, where Indian children underwent acculturation into white society, were touted as an economical alternative solution to the nation’s “Indian problem” (as opposed to outright war).  Under Grant’s Peace Policy of 1869, thousands of American Indian children as young as 5 years old were taken from their families and subjected to a life of harsh discipline and cultural cleansing.

The schools were modeled after a prison school created by Captain Richard H. Pratt for Indian prisoners of war in Florida and were usually operated with military precision.  Pratt’s philosophy of rigid order became the desired model.  Punishment was swiftly meted out for offenses such as displaying any Indian tendencies.  Students’ mouths were scrubbed out with lye soap for uttering any words in their native language.  Children were virtual prisoners at the schools, forbidden to visit their parents, forced into hard labor, and subjected to a host of abuses including physical and sexual abuse by school officials and other students.

Since the schools usually functioned with limited funds, children frequently died from starvation or preventable diseases.  Pratt’s philosophy to “kill the Indian to save the man” was widely embraced as a more humane, Christian solution for controlling the Indian population…  Native children were trained to become “useful, contributing” members of the new America as domestic servants — the only role for which they were deemed fit.  This policy of forced acculturation was supported by the U.S. government, which appropriated funds for more than 400 such schools.

This blurb flanked one woman’s story, “Bitter Legacy of American Indian boarding schools” by Mary Annette Pember:

Like too many Indian people from her [author's mother] generation [born in 1925], she and her siblings were forcibly taken from their family by non-Indian reservation authorities.  They were then turned over to the church and the Catholic nuns who ran a boarding schools [sic] that existed for the purpose of stripping away Indian culture and identity from Indian children…

Her most frequently recurring memory in the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of an older boy and how she “screamed and screamed.”  She also tells us how the nuns nailed her  younger brother to the wooden plank dining table overnight when he wouldn’t eat a dinner of stewed onions.  And about the beatings for speaking the Ojibwe language, for stealing food, for crying for one’s parents, for disobeying, for not working hard enough.  The list goes on and on.

Life at the “sister school” robbed the experience of family or knowledge of parenting skills from my mother.  Visits with family were kept to a minimum while the nuns over looked [sic] the event to ensure nothing “Indian” was passed along to the children.  She recalls the only visit from her mother, who gave her a five-pound box of chocolates.  Back in the dormitory,

OMG make sure no one is looking before you read this, and/or get a box of tissues

she quickly devoured the candy until she vomited.  She has often told us she never liked chocolates after that and that she never got along with her mother.  It was as though a mother’s love was a sweetness she could never taste.

Returning to the closing paragraph from the earlier “Kill the Indian” blurb, wonder if these folks have noticed trickle-down f*ckonomics yet in Urban Dictionary:

Grass roots native organizations such as the Boarding School Project are making the case that the intergenerational trauma experienced at boarding schools has created post-traumatic stress disorder that has been passed down through generations.

Gawd, so heartbreaking, but it makes me wonder:  our society was so blind to what we can now see to be deeply unethical, no good, very bad behavior.  Are there decisions that we as a society will look back on twenty, fifty, a hunnerd (this is how we pronounce ‘hundred’ where I come from) years from now and say, “Yeesh, what were we smokin’?”  Is it ever possible to actually behave ethically, like, spanning-time-ethically, or all we all doomed to bumble around, trying to balance the clutch and the gas while jamming it into second gear?

I’d like to think that as a society we’ve got a pretty good system for evaluating inputs and making decisions.  But when I think about how hard it is for me to know if I’m behaving ethically, authentically, honestly, Anittah-ly…  how can I expect that the sum of all of us un-optimized units feel confident that we’re charting a course that’s just, that’s right, that’s true?

I guess I shouldn’t fret about it too much.  We’re doin’ the best we can, right?  And me too, yeah?

Yeah, okay, yeah.  I’m doin’ the best I can.

(Right?)

(Coach?)

ECHO echo echo