1. RIP Anna June, my grandma, 1924 - 2012. Memories, a message and a messenger

    “Death is not a mistake, nor a failure, nor a punishment—it is a violent revolution contesting spirit and body. It proves that change is the natural order of things.” — Janet Cyril, Malkia Cyril’s mom

    After being diagnosed with terminal cancer five months ago, my grandmother, my mother’s mother, passed away early this morning. I’m named after her— she’s Anna June, and I’m Deanna June. Our matrilineage is one that is fierce and I’m heartbroken to lose her. 

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  2. Lost Android phone contingency plan

    Dropbox

    Quick hit: I lost my phone in a cab last night, and while the sweetest kid EVER found it and got it back to me, it made me think twice about my mobile contingency plan. I realized I had a few holes, so I wanted to share what I’ve already done, and how I’m patching the holes. All of these are Android-specific; I haven’t investigated iOS options for my iPad yet.

    • Contacts. All of my contacts are through my Google Apps account for deannazandt.com, so we’re good there.
    • Apps. I’ve rooted my phone, so I use Titanium Backup Pro to create regularly scheduled backups of the application and application data on my phone. The free version sends the backups to your SD card; I bought the Pro version so I could have those apps backed up to Dropbox, too.
    • SMS & MMS. I use Backup to Gmail for this. It automatically sends your SMS, MMS and Call Log to your Google account, and files them in the Archive with appropriate labels.
    • Photos. This was the big one for me: I have a lot of photos on my phone that aren’t shared on my social networks. I was mourning the potential loss of some precious Christmas photos, for example. I’m now trying out SugarSync to back these up to SugarSync’s cloud, and then to my laptop; I chose this one because many services wanted to use public social networks for the backup. That was too risky for me. Plus, it seems that SugarSync has good reviews on managing battery and scheduling, and you get 5GB of free space.
    • Locator. Tara Hunt turned me on to Prey, which is a full suite of services for a lost phone. You can locate the lost device, send messages to it for the finder to tell them how to get in touch with you, and if they don’t comply, you can brick the device.

    Those were the biggies for me. What else am I missing?

  3. Tourist Tips: Manhattan in a Day

    I made this list over on Foursquare to help folks who are visiting and want to have an easy-to-follow plan. This is inspired by the number of times friends and family from my hometown upstate have done one of the day-trip-to-the-city packages, and I’ve taken them around. There’s a million other things to add (taking suggestions in the comments!), but this generally works for the timeframe allotted.

    There wasn’t enough room to make all the notes I wanted to, so I’m adding all the little extra bits here.

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  4. How my iPad got named after Wanda Sykes

    I posted the above photo from the Women’s Media Center gala last night, with a note that I got to tell Wanda Sykes that I’d named my iPad her—she was emceeing the festivities. Disclaimer: I lurve her. I lurve everything she’s done, and I have most of “Sick & Tired,” one of her stand-up DVDs, memorized. If you haven’t seen it… OMG. Go. Watch. Now.

    Anyhoo, the iPad story. 

    I had been holding off on getting one for a long time. One, I didn’t, honestly, really get them. They’re a giant iPhone, what’s the big deal? (I now know better. I have seen the Light.) But more importantly, two: I was trying to be good with my money and not spend it on every little thing. My dear friend Sonal has been helping me with this over the last year—coaching me and basically being my sponsor every time I wanted to buy something unnecessary. “You will feel better,” she kept telling me, “with that $800 in your savings account when things get scary.” Sigh, she’s right.

    When I came back from Berlin in September, things had improved on the financial front, but I was still really trying to hold off on the iPad till the new one comes out sometime next year. Then I started to have a REEEAAAALLLYYYY crappy day one day. I mean, just everything was going wrong. I started to get the iPad itch, and called Sonal.

    “I want to go buy an iPad. Like, right now. Just leave the house and go get one,” I said.

    Turns out, Sonal was having a reeeeeaaalllyyy crappy day, too. “You know what? You should. F*** it. Just go f***ing buy it.”

    “Yeah!” I squealed. “F*** it! Nothing matters! Everything’s pointless! Whee!”

    We started giggling and riffing and landed on this favorite bit of ours from Ms Sykes. Good Lord, we laughed so hard we were crying and yelling “I don’t give a f***!”

    I went and bought the iPad that evening. I bought her a pink cover, and named her “Wanda Sykes.”

    —

    Post script: when I told her this story, she laughed and then stopped and got semi-serious sounding, and said, “That’s a good story.” WIN.

  5. Hanging out on the plateaus of ordinary: on reimagining passion, work and the meaning of life

    There comes a point in everyone’s career where you start to wonder just what in the world you’re doing, and how on earth you ended up there. We don’t talk a lot about these moments — until after we’ve reached the next milestone, the Next Big Thing, and then we have the liberty to confess our confusion and doubt, since it’s over with.

    I’m currently part-way through the confusion and doubt phase, but I had the good fortune to get some huge doses of insight and advice in the last few weeks. Whenever I’ve shared those things with my close friends, they’ve had the same “Holy crap!” moment that I had. So, I thought it might useful for more people if I shared them with a wider audience.

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  6. If I recall correctly from David Mamet’s writings, he says a person never says what he means. He never says, “I want to talk to you about that money you owe me”, he says “Where the hell WERE you last night?!” That’s one of the best things you can learn if you want to write about PEOPLE. They have subconscious motivations that always guide their conscious dialogue and actions.

    — On Not Shooting the Outline, Part 2 « The SAW Blog

  7. Rounding up more thoughts on Occupy Wall St

    Using this post as a collection point for what I’ve been reading, hearing, seeing. I did make a short trip over to Liberty Plaza/Zuccotti Park with Quinn Heraty Monday night, who gave me the full tour. We also stayed for the first chunk of the General Assembly meeting… Deepak Chopra spoke for a minute (!), and then there was a hearty discussion about purchasing sleeping bags. (That sounds like I’m being sarcastic, but I’m not. It was good.)

    Overall, the trip didn’t win me over (or woo me back into my hot, lusty relationship with activism of yore, to continue the metaphor in my previous post). But I’m still thinking and learning, and the fact that we’re all hemming and hawing over has to mean something for the moment. I hope that’s not just my privilege speaking.

    Planning on going to the big labor/community march today, looking forward to see what this next jump in evolution brings.

    Now, some reactions from friends, via email or on the web.

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  8. Occupy Wall Street: I want to believe

    [Update: Part 2 of this post continues here.]

    I’ve been staring at this blank box on my blogging screen for three or four days now, trying to figure out just how to start a post about the thoughts and conversations I’ve been having about Occupy Wall Street (and by extension, Occupy Everything). I keep wishing I could state my relationship status to the occupation as “it’s complicated.”

    The heart of my politics are clear on the situation: I believe in dismantling the paradigms and systems that allow egregiously selfish capitalism to thrive while destroying and oppressing a huge percentage of those that have little to no say in the matter. I’m on the left. The very, very far left. That much is clear to me.

    It’s all in the execution, though, isn’t it?

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  9. “Say your prayers, and keep your legs crossed.” — RIP Louise Kane, 1915 - 2011


    Louise with my mom at the Zandt Family Reunion, maybe 10-15 years ago

    [UPDATED below with a pic and short story from my brother]

    This morning, my neighbor from growing up, Louise Kane, passed away. It feels weird to even type her name out — my brother and I called her “Mrs. Kane” well after we were already adults. She’d say, “Call me ‘Louise!’ God!” But we just couldn’t.

    I want to share some stories about her as I begin the sort of “official” grieving process. She’d been declining for a while — she was due to turn 96 in two weeks — but the loss is deeply painful. I can’t do the whole picture of her justice, but let me start by explaining that she was one of the most influential bad-ass women of my life, along with my mom and my grandmother (mom’s mother). I gave Izzy her middle name, Louise, in honor of her.

    A strict Irish-Catholic, Mrs. Kane used to call my Lutheran family “broken-away Catholics,” and married a Jewish man twenty years older than her. We never got to meet Louie (yes, they were “Louie and Louise”) — he died the year before my parents moved in next door to her — but his spirit was always very much part of her. 

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  10. Astronomy humor with Pop

    When I was in third grade, my teacher launched the gifted & talented program at my school, and one of the first sections was an astronomy program. Surprisingly enough, the smallish town I grew up in had a great observatory, and we studied loads of cool stuff there for a few weeks.

    Because it was a bit of a hike from where we lived, my dad would wait and hang out while we did our thing. Our instructor was Dr. Jay Sarton, and Pop told me this morning he said to him once, “You’ve studied, and gone through all this training, and you’ve got a doctorate and all, but you still gotta work nights?”