January 2012
1 post
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RIP Anna June, my grandma, 1924 - 2012. Memories,...
“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—...
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Lost Android phone contingency plan
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...
December 2011
3 posts
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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...
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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....
November 2011
1 post
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Hanging out on the plateaus of ordinary: on...
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...
October 2011
4 posts
“If I recall correctly from David Mamet’s writings, he says a person never says...”
– On Not Shooting the Outline, Part 2 « The SAW Blog
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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...
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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...
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"Say your prayers, and keep your legs crossed." --...
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!’...
September 2011
3 posts
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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...
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Reflections on 9/11
{pic: the journal I started the week of 9/11/01}
This feels a little self-indulgent, writing down what’s been going through my head as I remember. I’m still alive, and I didn’t know anyone that died. Not sure what my impetus to share is. I just started reading “A Path with Heart,” which is a sort of Buddhism-101 text, and if there’s any day to honor the human...
It's always the second question
The first question can be anything — where are you from, what do you do, when did you get here, where do you live. But the second question I’m always asked whenever I’m in Germany: “Why do you speak German?” I love the directness of this question. Americans would ask a more polite/roundabout, “Where/How did you learn German?” But Germans, dammit, they want...
August 2011
1 post
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Notes on international mobile data roaming
First, let’s just say it: roaming outside the US with a US-carrier smartphone and SIM card, no matter what you do, is highway robbery. There, now that that’s out of the way…
I have a global phone from Verizon (shoutout: Droid Incredible 2, w00t w00t), and I’d planned on purchasing a German SIM card to use on my trip, since it’s too expensive to use Verizon’s...
July 2011
5 posts
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Crowdsourced: Summer reading list
I’d put out a call for “good, meaty fiction” or “terrible, addictive, brain candy fiction” on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ over the weekend, and received a bunch of responses! I catalogued most of them here for everyone’s enjoyment.
Recent historical fiction
Half A Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Tiger’s Wife: A Novel by Tea Obreht
Cutting...
4 tags
The tooth fairy vs grown-ups
I emailed my mom my realization that the Tooth Fairy didn’t come visit me after my extraction last week. It was probably alright, though, since the Mom Fairy did come… this was her response:
Hmmm, I was just discussing this with friends too. Jean tells me she’s not certain your situation qualifies for a visit from the tooth fairy as your tooth was deliberately pulled and...
Heartwarming lost & found pet stuff from...
If you’re an animal lover in Brooklyn, do consider becoming a member of FIDO Brooklyn, or at least getting on their (very low-traffic) announcement list. They post lost and found animals, and evidently have about a 60% success rate in facilitating reunion. Bob, who runs the list, recently posted this roundup of happy endings and still-looking cases:
Fizzgig the cat made it home as did...
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WordPress noodling: displaying date-based archives...
I have a client who’s using the Posts functions in Wordpress for multiple purposes. One issue we’ve run up against is that we want the date-based archives (i.e., in the sidebar, showing the months of posts) to only pull from one category out of the 30-40 categories that they have. I was using wp_get_archives, but it doesn’t have a category parameter as I’d hoped.
After...
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East Village: Music & Movies in the park series!
Just found out about this from Phil Hartman of Two Boots Pizza — every Thursday night this summer, they’re putting on shows with COMPLETELY AWESOME movies and fantastic bands in Tompkins Square Park. It started last night, and will run through Sept. 1. All shows start an hour before sunset and are totally FREE.
This is why I live in NYC, people.
June 30 - Raging Bull (Introduced by...
June 2011
1 post
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New Verizon global phone: HTC Incredible 2 vs...
I need to get a global phone from Verizon before I go to Berlin this summer, and found out last night that they approved an early upgrade for me. I’m likely going to purchase it today so that I can get going with setting it up and unlocking the SIM, but I need to decide which one to get. It’s between the HTC Incredible 2, and the Motorola Droid 2 Global.
Help me decide! Here are my...
May 2011
4 posts
4 tags
On rape acquittal & jury verdicts
Two NYC cops were acquitted of raping a drunk woman in her apartment today.
Over on Facebook, after I posted about this, someone asked if I’d seen the evidence. No, why? I asked. He said that it was hard to critique a verdict without actually being there.
Yeah.
The best response came from Thomas MacAulay Millar:
If we atomize the world, it’s difficult to critique anything. But if we look...
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The revolution will be...
I was commissioned to write and perform a poem at Poetic People Power’s 9th annual show at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe last night. The following is the piece I created; will post video when it’s available.
I was asked to relate some of my feelings about the intersection of technology and activism, so of course, my mind wandered over to storytelling and social change, and how social media...
Heh.
Grandma’s telling the story of when I was about 8 or 9, she & I beat everyone else to the ice cream store, and I said, “Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together?” (also, if you know my grandma’s driving, it’s no surprise that we were first)
"You are one creepy mom."
My mom and I are getting ready for a road trip to Ohio, and I’ve been putting together some iPod playlists for the car. I’ll spare you the details (mostly because the cringe-worthy songs we’re going to listen to are ones that I actually enjoy), but I asked Mom the other night if there was anything else she wanted to add.
“Oh, there was one by the New Christy...
April 2011
4 posts
Amazon Kindle: from Bossypants →
So my unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do?” If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people...
Getting away with murder on Long Island
When a reporter asked, ‘What can sex workers do to prevent violence?’ I said, ‘Well, maybe people could not kill us.’
— Audacia Ray
Make sure you read the whole piece.
4 tags
Destination unknown
On WNYC this morning, there was a story about a young Hasidic man who left his community about a year ago. It was evidently excerpted from this episode of a podcast on Vox Tablet, a magazine on contemporary Jewish life. Aside from the stranger-in-a-strange land bits, which were heartrending and at times, amusing, there was one quote from Luzer that struck me (speaking about himself in the third...
5 tags
Crunchy rosemary lemon garlic chicken
Learned from a fellow member of the Park Slope Food Coop.
2 large boneless/skinless chicken breasts 8 rosemary crackers, crushed Dash of kosher salt, pepper 2 cloves of garlic, finely diced Zest of 2/3 of a lemon Handful of fresh parsley, finely chopped Flour Egg, beaten
Preheat oven to 475º. Split the chicken breasts and pound till on the thin side. Dip in flour, then egg, then in mixture;...
March 2011
2 posts
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This hit home for me
“…The amount of time and energy I put into marketing is exhausting. I am continuously overwhelmed by the amount of work I have to do that isn’t writing a book. I hardly have time to write anymore, which sucks and terrifies me.” To the New York Times, she said, “I want to be a writer. I do not want to spend 40 hours a week handling e-mails, formatting covers, finding...
My full profile for Time Out New York
They edited my submission down quite a bit for this dating series in Time Out New York (I’m 2nd to last), so I thought I’d post the whole thing. I actually didn’t write this; I asked 3 close friends and 2 close family members to answer the questions for me, and then I created a composite. Those grrls ROCK.
What makes you a great catch: I’m very silly, sweet and...
February 2011
3 posts
5 tags
Overhauling my Facebook profile
Like many of my friends with lives as semi-public figures (writers, activists, actors, etc.), I’ve decided that I need a more delineated approach to how my life on Facebook is managed. As many of you know, I’ve advocated (especially in my book) for a more-the-merrier approach to what you share with whom, since I feel like the cross-pollination of our lives across multiple spheres...
7 tags
Disconnection observations: what I learned on my...
I’ve just gotten back from my first ever digital vacation—I spent five days in the Caribbean offline. Well, I’ll admit—I didn’t go completely offline. What I did was commit to 5 days of zero digital communication, and I didn’t answer or use anything on my phone. (It helped that I was abroad, so I didn’t want to pay insane roaming fees associated with both...
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Good advice for giving a talk
The illustrious Ruth Ann Harnisch and I were emailing this morning, and I mentioned that I’m nervous about the panel I’m on this afternoon — WikiLeaks and Online Civil Disobedience at Social Media Week. She said:
ENJOY your presentation – bring ENJOYMENT to the stage so your audience can enjoy the experience. This isn’t supposed to feel like dental work to you or the...
January 2011
7 posts
6 tags
Small, tedious data entry gig
UPDATE! Someone’s been hired. Thanks.
In an effort to get a bunch of my s*** organized, I need help with my books. I’m looking for someone to look at pictures I’ve taken of my bookshelves, and enter each book & its author into an Excel spreadsheet. Then, for each book, look up & enter the ISBN into the sheet.
Not hard, but tedious—therefore, I need someone with...
Sigh.
“Gender is a huge hot-button issue for lots of people who feel strongly about it,” she said. “I am not interested in triggering those strong feelings.”
— Sue Gardner, executive director of Wikimedia Foundation, on how the 15%-women ratio of Wikipedia editors bums her out, but she’s not going to do anything overt about it.
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Quote from the Met: O'Keefe on Stieglitz
“I put up with what seemed to be a good deal of contradictory nonsense because of what seemed clear and bright and wonderful.” — Georgia O’Keefe on Alfred Stieglitz
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Being a responsible community member during...
There’s a longer post that I’ll write up about social media at the AZ shootings, but for the moment I wanted to share some excerpts from my book as a gentle reminder to check everything you share before you post. There were some awful mishaps this weekend, and I hate to see us keep repeating the same mistakes over and over.
You can read all the sections from this part of my book:
...
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Making lemonade out of getting mugged
Three summers ago in Chicago, I was walking home with one of my good friends on a lovely, warm night. I had stopped there on my way to San Francisco to see friends that I normally only got to run into at random conferences throughout the year. One of them was Christine, an editor and writer I’d long admired but had only just started to get to know the year before. But there we were,...
On giving proper apologies
1. I was wrong 2. I’m sorry I hurt you 3. How can I make it better?
Womanist Musings: Save your apologies, Chris Brown
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Annual Magic 8 Ball music ritual
It’s that time of year again: time to shake the ol’ music library and see what’s in store for the coming year. (I do this for many signifiers of time passing… I close my eyes, set my intention, ask my music player what’s in store for me and then hit shuffle.) It’s generally pretty spooky (and wicked fun).
This past year has been a bit of an emotional roller...
December 2010
6 posts
A myriad of theories on why the city sucked so...
This week, as Mr. Bloomberg conceded that the city’s response to the blizzard had been inadequate, many theories, in both shouts and whispers, have been offered to explain the shortcomings: the Sanitation Department had undergone staffing cuts; the ferocity of the snowfall and the power of the accompanying winds had presented extraordinary challenges to the city’s snow plows; angry sanitation...
6 tags
Glühwein recipe
My dad made this for me once when I had the worst chest-flu of my adult life, and it cured me within a day. The elderberry is a natural decongestant, and the warm wine cozies you right to sleep. But! It’s also just good on its own, sans death-warmed-over-feeling.
1 750ml bottle of red wine (I like Shiraz, myself) 4-5 tbsp elderberry jam 1 stick of cinnamon 10 or so whole cloves
...
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One more discovery on running/breathing:...
I’ve noticed that I’ve been really, really sniffly and increasingly sneezy after running at the gym. On Saturday, it was so strong that I pretty much didn’t stop sneezing & blowing my nose all day, and the tingling in one side of my nose didn’t stop till almost 48 hours later. I was skin-tested for allergies of all kinds two years ago, and came up not allergic to...
noneck: I'm running for the NY Tech Meetup's Board... →
noneck:
I know that New York City is the best damn city on the planet. I see this meetup and its board as a platform of information and innovation. Our board must embody our best ideals and be it all that it can be. We MUST put our 501c6 status to good use and fight for a better tomorrow.
…
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Great news on the running/breathing front
A bunch of you may have been following my running/breathing travails— I was having a really hard time after I got a few weeks into the Couch-to-5k program. For a while I thought it was just that I was out of shape… as I told the guys I bought my new sneakers from, I haven’t run for anything but the bus in about 20 years. As it got colder, things got worse, but even in warmer...
November 2010
4 posts
Fundraiser: Help for a new Chilean friend
I’m sitting in O’Hare on a layover, trying to get this post done before boarding, so forgive the brevity.
While I was in Chile, one if the guys who led the digital disaster response to the earthquake, Pedro, was basically our nightly tour guide. He took us to completely awesome restaurants, for example — but unfortunately, one night, while we were all out eating, his backpack...
Why the Internet isn't interesting or valuable to...
From my book:
“Leave it to the experts” may work in a number of environments, especially those constrained to traditional top-down hierarchical structures, but the Internet’s open platform makes such traditional constraints outmoded and even damaging. Joshua Breitbart, policy director for the People’s Production House, in a talk about the importance of featuring diverse perspectives when...
The best email thread all year
Editor’s note: My good friend Nancy Goldstein was a finalist in the Washington Post’s “America’s Next Great Pundit” contest. She wrote to me and Sonal (my best friend-colleague-communications rockstar) for advice about the video shoot that was part of the contest. Here’s the ensuing email thread… Nancy writes: Subject: May I wear my glasses on video...
Living the New York life
A conversation I had with John Weiss (of the Colorado Springs Independent) at the end of October was worth sharing… we were talking about the financial difficulties of being a freelancer/consultant and publishing a book, and all the contradictions that come with
John: “You’re such a good New Yorker, though. You don’t know where rent is coming from next month, but...
October 2010
2 posts
My dad's tech support skills only go so far
“I was finally getting around to updating Microsoft Office on the upstairs computer, and somehow I downloaded the Spanish version. It kept asking me—I think—if I wanted to continue. And ‘no’ is always on the right side, so I clicked that. I chose English the second time but it stilled showed up in Spanish. I dunno what happened. So, I just sent them an email asking...