Sometimes Life Demands Haiku

For example, on Tuesday I was sitting in one of my classes and, having used up my self-allotted number of textually-based fights for that class period, I was bored. Instead of doing my todo list (which has gotten much shorter than last time I posted about it), I wrote haiku all over his handouts.

This is not to imply that I wasn’t paying attention–I continued to contribute throughout the class, but as soon as the professor had answered my point and moved on in his lecture, I started working on my haikus again. Sometimes, on high energy-low outlet days, I try to find creative outlets rather than get frustrated in class.

Here are my 3 best:

Rushing faster, wheels
thrumming, stuck leaf slip-slapping
quick—brake! Goddamn squirrel.

Procrastinating:
Hoping I’ll work faster if
I’m running scared

Study or read for
pleasure? I must study, but–
Cryptonomicon.

And here are 3 I am still working on:

My teacher’s kid is
sick. “in-shallah.” My dress is
pretty. “in-shallah.”

My hips settle on
the hard practice-room stool. I
plunk a note–joy reigns.

Sugar, milk, butter
& eggs. Mix by hand then add
dry ingredients

Inspirational Quotes:

“I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air.”–Nathaniel Hawthorne

Shameless Self-Promotion (but I’m proud of myself!)

A few weeks ago, friends and family caught sight of an article in Carnegie Mellon Today about yours truly’s trip to the Presidential Inauguration last January and authorship of a photo used on the cover of the magazine of the Special Libraries Association. Because Carnegie Mellon Today does not post their old issues until the end of the month, I couldn’t link to that article until now. I’m famous! Yay!

Inspirational Quote:

Robert Cialdini: Taking on too much

Over the stretch of my professional years, I’d say my most nagging error has involved an inability to gauge correctly the point at which the next possible undertaking – or even golden opportunity – should be firmly rejected. Whenever I’ve allowed one-too-many responsibilities onto my plate, everything – including the new item – has suffered from the overcrowding. With that threshold crossed, I’ve no longer had the time or patience to plan, think, or toil hard enough to be proud of the resultant work. If I had a single piece of advice for young researchers, it would be to create and follow a rule for avoiding this state of affairs. The rule could involve something objective (e.g., never exceeding a specific quota of research involvements) or subjective (e.g., avoiding the feeling of rushing to, from, and through all of one’s commitments). The key is to apply the rule ruthlessly. Anything less would be another form of error.

Dr Robert Cialdini, a social psychologist at Arizona State University, is the most widely cited expert on influence and persuasion alive today. His most recent book is Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways To Be Persuasive.

Opera as Training for Human Rights Advocacy (and at video from last night’s performance!)

I tend to get a certain question–”Opera? How does that fit?”–a lot, particularly when marketing myself to potential employers. I usually explain that singing opera gives me a unique opportunity to get comfortable performing, engage with texts in half a dozen languages, and teaches me about effective management (because if there has ever been an unmanageable group, it is opera singers). But those answers all leave out the most important reason why my opera training helps me be a more effective advocate for human rights: because opera is about human rights.

I’ll use the opera I am in (go here to see the webcast). Dialogues of the Carmelites by Poulenc is about the lives of the nuns who were massacred in 1794 in France near the end of the revolution. More to the point, it is about human rights in a time of revolution.

1. Religious persecution

   In the opera, the Carmelites were a reflective order. As the Mother Superior says: “we are nothing but a house of prayer”. However, because they are perceived by agents of the revolution (a cadre of soldiers in this case) to be representatives of the Pope, they are treated as traitors and publicly stripped )in the final scene of Act 2 (in our version, the soldiers also attempt to steal the sacramental cup). The anti-Catholic actions of the soldiers are put into context by the captain of the guard who tells Mother Marie “In the church at home, I served two years as Sacristan. Our noble priest, I loved him like a brother–but I’ve no choice but to howl with all the wolves”. Whether motivated by fear of the mob or hatred of the church, the soldiers are engaging in religious oppression.

2. State-sponsored violence

   The soldiers are also agents of state-sponsored violence. As representatives of the revolution, they feel empowered to harass and humiliate the nuns. When the nuns are imprisoned, the jailer (also a representative of the revolution) taunts them and accuses them of being in “correspondence with our enemies”, when they were really imprisoned for having mass illegally. Even more tellingly, as the nuns are herded into a government office where they must sign their names to receive “the benefits of liberty” (access to food and housing?), a soldier tells them they will continue to be “under the watchful eye of the law”–as he says this in our production, he leers at Sister Constance (a novice) and stalks her as she rushes to sign her name. The opera shows the evils of power without accountability and how it can become state-sponsored violence.

3. Judicial corruption

   In the opera, the nuns are sentenced to death and executed without a trial by their peers, essentially murdered by committee. Before that, just before they are stripped, they are informed they have been expelled from their home “in the name of the Republic”–that is, an undemocratically elected group who used the church as a symbol of the opulence and aristocracy they hated (in this case, ignoring the willing poverty in which the nuns lived to cast them as agents of the Pope).

4. Violence against women

   While some of the nuns fight back (yours truly tries to take a soldier out when he starts to strip a friend) the opera is a story of men attacking a women’s community. The most peaceful scenes (1.3 where we are all spinning and sewing, 2.2 where we meet the new Mother Superior) are occupied solely by women. The opera makes the case that women can create their own self-sufficient communities which men (with the exception of the priest, who is allied with the women because he is celibate) see as threatening to their power and feel they must use violence to  destroy (whether by banning them as the soldiers do, or trying to force women to leave them, as Blanche’s brother does).

5. Casualties of progress

   The nuns did represent orthodoxy–as a largely sequestered order, they had an allegiance to the monarchical system which had supported them for hundreds of years. The french revolution, for all of its blood and terror, eventually brought about one of our world’s great democratic nations. But good opera, like all good history, does not lend itself to easy categories like good and bad. For me, the joy of opera is the complexity of the picture is presents. In the end, the women in the convent were restricted by their vows to a life I would never choose as a modern woman. But their life is also not one I would deny to a women who chose it freely. As Madame Lidoine reminds us as the sisters await their sentence in prison: “How could they deprive us of liberty, which we so long ago surrendered of our free will?”

Finally, here is our execution scene from last night, via a bootleg (I’m the one of the far right, who walks to the guillotine holding my sister’s hand):

Inspirational Quote:

“The arts is a life of faith, its pure faith.
People preach about faith, who have no idea what faith is.

But artists know. Artists are the lilies of the field that Jesus preached about in the Sermon of the Mount.

‘Consider the Lilies, don’t worry about what you are going to eat or wear. Consider the lilies. They toil not and spin not, and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.’

The life of the artist is pure, pure faith.”

September 19, 2009. The News from Lake Wobegone, with Garrison Keillor

My Top Three Picks for Summer Interships in Washington DC (as of 1:44pm, October 18, 2009)

I’m writing from the middle of the internship competition season, part I. Because of long security review periods, I have to apply for federal internships (with the Departments of State or Defense, or the Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service) by Early November 2009. NGOs which work closely with the federal government (or are highly competitive) can also have their summer internship deadlines in November. Part II of internship competition season will start around March and go until April or early May–this is where the smaller, but just as awesome, NGOs will want their applications.

I’ve been keeping my eye open for neat opportunities since this summer, but I’ve really been trolling Idealist (the best place I have found for public interest internships) for a few weeks and here are my top 3 picks (below is a description of how I chose them):

1. Working on the Trafficking in Persons Report for the United States Department of State. This would be my favorite government publication. This has the earliest deadline (November 2nd) but, pending research, it looks like an incredible opportunity.
2. Enhance the online presence (blog, website, forum, Facebook) of the American Islamic Congress. The internship would also involve researching student press, and lots and lots of writing. AIC a group of moderate Muslims who came together after 9/11 to propagate the political views of moderate Muslims. Just like every other group, the tails ends of the bell curve of the American Muslim community dominate our politics discourse–the AIC supports the middle of that curve. From their website, they look like an agile group which actually helps people (see Project Nur, a community of campus advocacy groups AIC supports) where I would get autonomy and have the chance to learn effective advocacy while writing every day. NOTE: AIC has no and promotes no religious views–it represents a religious group’s political views (Less 700 Club, more Episcopal Relief and Development).
3. Writing about the human rights concerns and works of the Advocacy Project, a group which guides citizens left out of the peace conversation in their countries to speak up. They support “peace fellows” who go to countries struggling towards peace and work with advocates there to access tell their narratives, choose good exposition tools, and get funds.

This list will probably shift and flow (and there are tons of amazing internships I haven’t listed here!) but these are my top 3 picks for today.

My non-negotiables:

The organization:

1. Must be deal with transnational issues.
2. It must actually help people, not just do research about them.
3. It must be trying to use new media to spread its message.

The internship:

1. Must involve helping people access information
2. Involve writing (for reports, blogs, press-releases)
3. Must be in the public interest

That’s it for now!

Inspirational Quote:

“If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.” Dorothy Parker

A Problem in Search of a Metaphor

I am considering applying to Carnegie Mellon’s 5th year scholar program. It is full funding (+stipend) for an additional year of study for

“a small number of exceptional students to remain on campus for one full year following the completion of their normal course of study”.

In that year, I would

“pursue a broadened educational experience while continuing to enhance the Carnegie Mellon community [...]“.

Applications aren’t due for a few months, but I am already brain-storming about how I could “enhance the Carnegie Mellon community”; that is, what my 5th year project would be. My current idea is so new to me that I still haven’t come up with a good metaphor for the problem it addresses, but here goes.

–

Problem

Carnegie Mellon is like a series of private gardens, where students, once planted, remain fixed within their walls. This segregation (sometimes called “silo-ing“) has intrinsic value: it gives the inmates of each of those gardens a community with-whom they identify, sometimes exclusively. But in a cross-disciplinary world, it also detracts from the community of communities which is my college.

This sorting into gardens happened months before any of us matriculated, when we were accepted into our schools. We did not build these walls. However, starting in our first week, we added our own bricks to the already impressive edifices with our college cheers:

College of Humanities and Social Sciences (H&SS):

*clap* *clap* *clapclapclap*
“We’re well rounded”
*clap* *clap* *clapclapclap*
“We’re well rounded”

College of Fine Arts (CFA):

“CFA! CFA! We look good every day!”
“CFA! CFA! We look good every day!”

Tepper School of Business (TSB):

“TSB! TSB! Someday you will work for me!”
“TSB! TSB! Someday you will work for me!”

Mellon College of Science (MCS):

“MCS! We’re the Best!
“MCS! We’re the Best”
“We know stuff that matters!”

Bachelor of Science and Arts (BSA):

“Two for one!”
“Two for one!”

Again, these cheers helped build community. But the taunts that make them spicy (“Someday you will work for me!”, “We know stuff that matters!”, “We look good everyday!”) are stereotypes which corrode our community of communities.

Goal

I want to lower the walls of our private gardens. Subject focus is part of what makes us Tartans, but there is nothing in our culture which demands that, once planted, we must not only work but think within the walls of our colleges. I believe that CMU is growing towards a culture of interdisciplinary thinking (a belief buoyed by the 7000+ hits for the word “interdisciplinary” on CMU’s site), but before we can have that culture, we need a narrative about ourselves which supports it. I want to provide that narrative, a tartan mirror, reflecting who we are as a whole, today and now.

A Tartan Mirror

For my senior+ year I would recruit a group of undergraduates who have taken Empirical Research Methods (and so know how to conduct form interviews) and who want to help reshape our community’s narrative. The group would be called Tartan Mirror.

We would conduct hundreds of interviews of CMU students, and ask them about what makes them Tartans. I know we are part of a community, but what does that mean? What are our similarities in thought patterns, aspirations, goals, that we all share? What clubs are popular? What majors? Who do we think we are?

Each day of interviews, we would post a few quotes about what it means to be a Tartan on the project blog, and also document our methods for anyone else who was interested in such a project.

This blog would be the immediate enhancement to CMU.

We would transcribe the recordings and retain the notes from this project, creating a repository of information about who Tartans are right now, in this time and in this place. This would be a resource, a time-capsule, for future scholars to draw from to find out where they came from. This is the long terms enhancement.

The medium term enhancement would be a publication of selected moments of the interviews (selected by the Tartan Mirror staff) in an anthology, similar to This I Believe, which would only be published (with names obscured) 5-years after my senior+ year, so that nearly all undergraduates interviewed would have graduated.

–

This proposal is very tentative. I will probably change the methods, the focus, maybe scrap the whole thing. But I think best in writing, and wanted to put it somewhere. If you have any ideas, I’d love to hear. Have a great evening!

Inspirational Quote:

“Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.” ~Albert Einstein

Back from Hopper, Still Flying

Picture by Katy Dickinson (my mom)
[Me in the suit presenting my poster to
Maria Klawe, President of Harvey Mudd]
Originally uploaded by John Plocher

I’ve made some interesting academic changes (see next post) since returning from Hopper, and feel tastefully in control of my life (for now). I planned a successful panel for the Pre-Law Society (whose website I also admin); Unfortunately, instead of watching my amazing panelists in action, I had to go to opera rehearsal to have my head cut off. But in rehearsal I learned that most young opera singers will make their livings as covers, which is a good lesson for all growing professionals.

I love attending Hopper because it gives me a chance to see my horizons. I use the ocean as a metaphor for school (and I am, incongruously, the duck* on the surface of the ocean). Most of the time, school is like paddling on the ocean. Some days, a killer wave breaks over my head and I have to fight back to the surface. Sometimes I fly. Hopper helps me fly.

As always, a beautiful, moving, and successful conference.

*I use a duck because I often feel like a duck in public settings: serene and confidant on the surface, paddling like hell under the water. No, I do not molt on the carpet and go after small pieces of bread with terrifying fierceness. It’s a partial metaphor.

Inspirational Quote:

A desert is a place without expectation.–Nadine Gordimer

Arrived at Hopper: Resume Clinic was great, about to present my poster

I’m here in lovely Tuscon, AZ for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, eating popcorn from tiny bags and eagerly anticipating dinner. I’ve given my pitch to a few companies, attended a great resume clinic (here’s my resume, now a fixture on feelingelephants), and am dashing around Amelia (my laptop) opening windows to display my videos from p4. Just because it is cool, check out this video.

It is a play list of all of Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie, read aloud (this was part of my research last semester).

More later!

Inspirational Quote:

To say nothing is out here is incorrect; to say the desert is stingy with everything except space and light, stone and earth is closer to the truth.–William Least Heat Moon

A Biography of a Nun (Well, a character who is a nun)

I’m in the opera (Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites). I’ve mentioned this before, but I am near finalizing the biography of my character, and wanted to share it here. I am having so much fun in rehearsal–I keep meaning to email my karate teacher to tell him how valuable being able to fall safely has been in these rehearsals! (Soldiers representing The Republic force the nuns to strip to their shifts at bayonet point, and I fight back). Anyhoo, here it is:

Biography of Sister Anne of the Cross

I have known since I was a little girl that I wanted to be the wife of God. My sister and I grew up in Paris near the Sarbonne as the only daughters of a blacksmith who only wanted sons. Most of our happiest moments were spent in the garden because it was the one place papa wouldn’t go and we loved the peaceful feel of being surrounded by a community of women.

I would always plant the peas too close together because I thought as many as possible should have the chance to live. I would have to come in and cull the young ones before they grew too close together and killed each other. I could never abide death.

Mother took us to visit our cousin in Compiègne when I was 9 and you were 11 and we saw the Carmelites and fell in love. Mother told us that “carmel” (the name of a mountain in Israel), combined the Hebrew words karem (garden) and el (God), which together meant “garden of god”.

But before we run away together, my sister fell in love with John and they were married. She was 18 and he was 22. Having no one left at home, I spent two years planning my escape, and when I turned 18 I fled north with our cousin to Compiègne, and arrived at the convent with only the clothes on my back and no food in my stomach. Though I had always found God more present in flowers than in pews, Madame de Croissy (not then the prioress, but on the make) insisted I be let in, because the garden needed tending.

Within a year of my joining the convent, my sister (now Sister Gertrude) joined my convent. Her John had been a carpenter, and died in a duel with a customer who refused to pay for a beautiful bed he had made. She chose the name Sister Gertrude to help him reach heaven—Gertrude is the saint of souls in purgatory.

We lived and gardened together for 15 years, finding peace in prayer and humble service to God

We died on July 17, 1794. My sister was 33, I was 31.

Inspirational Quote:

“This is a brief overview of how the Carmelite Monasteries of women came to be founded in this region. We have a custom of calling our Monasteries ‘Carmels’. ‘Carmel’ is a biblical word, derived from the Hebrew ‘karem’ meaning a ‘vineyard’ or ‘garden’. When the suffix ‘el’ is added for the Divine name, it takes on the meaning of ‘the garden of the Lord.’ ‘Carmel’ is also a biblical symbol for beauty and fruitfulness; it is used by the spouse in the Song of Songs (7:5) in order to praise the beauty of the Beloved. We want our Monasteries to be truly ‘gardens of the Lord.” (Quote from Carmelites.net)

Listening to Akon in the Desert, on CMU’s Study Abroad Site

Sometimes I spend months working to build one more positive reference into my web presence. Sometimes it happens all of a sudden! Yesterday a CMU student abroad coordinator emailed the list of students who had studied abroad (as I did when I visited CMU-Qatar last semester, and as I will do again when I live there next semester) for their blog posts. I sent her this one, called “Listening to Akon in the Desert”. Illustrated with one of my favorite photos of myself, taken by CMU grad-student Patrick Gage, this post tells about my awesome experience “duning” in Qatar. Check it out!

Inspirational Quote:

“Every day I walk out into the world / to be dazzled, then to be reflective,” Mary Oliver

California Pasta Sauce (Jessica’s Mid-Week Destressing Project)

Because the G20’s in Pittsburgh, 2 of tomorrow’s 3 classes are canceled, so I have a little longer than usual to get my work done. I tamp down mid-week stress, I decided to cook my meals for the next few days. I decided to experiment with the lovely dried lavender my mom sent me from home. I’ve never really learned to follow instructions for recipes, and usually follow the whatever-is-in-the-fridge-and-looks-like-it-would-taste-nice method of pasta sauce creation.

But this time I decided to be a little more organized, which I how I have come up with a recipe to describe my creation. To give the sauce more dimension, I added half a jar of mild salsa (a great way to add veggis and heat to pasta sauce without chopping veggis). As all of the chicken-breast in the house is frozen, and I have a veggi housemate, I used canned kidney beans to add protein. Here is the recipe, more or less:

• 5 twigs of dried lavender, just the buds.
• 1 tablespoon olive oil, for simmering
• 2 cloves garlic, diced
• 1 red pepper, chopped roughly (each piece is around 1/2 x 1/2, though different sizes helps give the pasta body, so don’t worry about it too much)
• 1/2 a jar of salsa (around a 1/2 a cup)
• 1 large tomato, roughly chopped (mine was between the sizes of a baseball and a softball)
• 2.5 cups of kidney beans
• 20 ounces of a 26 ounce generic pasta sauce (we had some fancy kind, I usually just use Prego as a base)
• 1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper

Preparation instructions:

1. Washing the lavender twigs, and strip the buds.
2. Drizzle the olive oil in a medium pot (pots reduce splatter), start heating it at about medium heat, add the lavender buds. (I love the way the house smells when I am cooking, and simmering the buds alone made sure I was cooking within a pleasant fog of lavender smell. Also, when my housemates come home and say “oh, my god. That smells incredible. oh my god,” it is good for my ego.)
3. Dice the garlic, throw it in, stir to make sure nothing is sticking to the pan. Reduce or increase heat as necessary.
4. Chop the pepper, throw it in, stir.
5. With the pot hot, dump the salsa in. Most store-bought salsa is massively watery, so let a lot of that boil off while your chopping the tomato.
6. Let this simmer for a while, reducing and getting thick. Smell (carefully! splatter hurts.) and make sure the lavender and the garlic are playing nicely.
7. This is a great time to wash up the cutting board, unload the dishwasher, whatever.
8. Add kidney beans (drain as much of the fluid off as possible–it will add texture and flavor, but boiling off excess liquid takes annoying time)
9. Add pasta sauce. Let simmer, about 1/2 an hour (more if you like your sauces thick, less if you are rushed).

I used this time to finish the big batch of rigatoni I had boiling, and package it all away in tupperware. I finished up the dishes, unpacked our box from Alice.com, and check my rehearsal time tonight.

I usually believe that pasta sauce should serve as a meal by itself, and so get it as thick and stew-y as possible, but it smelled like this batch was going to be a little lavender-heavy and I didn’t want to concentrate that too much, so I boxed it up while it was still soup-y.

I just had it on top of some rigatoni, and mmmm, I really like what lavender does in pasta sauce. It’s like eating hearty perfume. Yumm.

Inspirational Quote:

“Non-cooks think it’s silly to invest two hours’ work in two minutes’ enjoyment; but if cooking is evanescent, so is the ballet.”–Julia Child