all good things: something new every day

All Good Things started as a one-hour Sunday night radio show on KSTO St. Olaf radio, featuring feel-good music and 10 highlights from the past week. The show, and its current written form, is brought to you by Clara, Second Set of Baby Steps creator, and my radio co-host Cassie. We both contribute things to the list, so I'll tell you who said what to avoid confusion.

So get cozy and get ready for this week's batch of good things!

1. Song of the week: And We Danced by Macklemore X Ryan Lewis. My officemate has been taking care of the music for the past couple of weeks, and every time this song came on I would ask her what it was. Finally figured it out this week before I had to ask her... And when I put a name to the song I realized that it makes me feel goofy and devilish and carefree... Which is just what I need at work a lot of times.

2. Irish soda bread. This has become sort of a tradition over the past 2 years: soda bread for St. Paddy's Day. It's got a quick prep time and it's dense and delicious. - Clara

3. Accountability. The women I swim with are a source of great inspiration to me. A lot of them are older than I am, and understand the importance of fitness on a much larger scale than I do. And this one woman in particular is so perceptive and thoughtful (without being overbearing) and humble, and says something to me every week that lifts me up and leaves me thinking. Last week she said, "I watch the people in the other lanes who are faster than me, and I learn from them. I learn something new every day and I get faster and faster." - Clara

4. FROZEN CAME OUT IN STORES THIS WEEK. I didn't get it yet, but just knowing it is now available to me is a constant source of excitement. - Clara

5. Getting our families together. Family is a big thing for both J and I, and this afternoon we got both of our families together for an engagement dinner at an Indian buffet we like. It turned out greater than I could have hoped - everybody got along great, and even the baby liked the food! We laughed and talked and ate for hours until (maybe even after) they closed for lunch, and my mom brought in ladoo (traditional celebratory sweets) and shared it with the whole restaurant! Definitely a highlight. - Clara

6. About Time. From the people who did Love Actually, I should have expected nothing less. It's billed as a "romantic drama" but it's really comedic and British and beautiful and it just says a lot about life, and family, and how we use our time, and what is important. Definitely recommend. - Clara

7. Well-deserved vacations. My parents headed off to a resort in Mexico this weekend. They never go on vacations (their last one was in 2004) so this is huge! They both work so hard, and it's so great to see them finally spend some time away to relax. - Cassie

8. Picking out paint colors. Luke and I are moving into a new apartment in a week or so. Our new landlords are painting the walls for us and are letting us choose the colors! After living for 2 and a half years in an apartment with all white walls I am so excited to be surrounded by color. Being able to choose our own colors is really going to make the new place feel like home so much more quickly. - Cassie

9. Membership at the local co-op. A couple years ago I became a member at the co-op in my neighborhood. Every time I go there to buy produce or organic products I leave feeling great! The people that work there are so friendly, and it feels like I'm part of the community. They also have amazing produce so that doesn't hurt. - Cassie

10. Going with the flow. I'm a planner by nature so sometimes when things suddenly crop up I have a hard time. However, when I'm forced to be more flexible things inevitably end up going well. Though it's hard for me I'm always grateful when things pop up that force me to be more easy-going. It's never good to have everything planned out all the time - even a planner can admit to that :) - Cassie



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Thank you, readers, for being with us tonight, and for giving me reasons to write, and things to write about.

And thanks for joining us every Sunday night! Join the Baby Steps on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/TheBabyStepsSaga for good things every day, and updates on new posts. Come back next week for another reminder of 10 more things to be thankful for!

Until then, be kind to each other, and find a reason to smile!

posted from Bloggeroid

guardian angels

I think I just got my first mosquito bite of 2012.

I'm sitting on the back patio on a fold-up chair from the dining room (since we don't have any outdoor furniture) and there is one lone 'skeeter lolling around my legs.  These DE mosquitoes BITE.  Like their probosces are made to be felt when they jab into your ankles.

Anyway, it is a beautiful day.  It's 6:30pm, mid-March, I'm in a T-shirt and shorts outside and I'm not even remotely cold.  We all know I've been needing it.  I don't think it's going to last very long, though; my vicious little friend has just been joined by a wingwoman... or two... or six...

So.  I just read the most beautiful letter from Mary in Kansas City, written in the most beautiful handwriting on the most beautiful paper--heavy, pulpy cardstock from India, classically printed.  She also slipped a little "pocket angel" into the envelope.  I love it for itself, and for the fact that it bears a kiss from Kansas City on its face, but what really struck me was that Ann sent me the same pocket angel, but gold-colored, a few months ago.

This cannot be a coincidence.  Someone is watching me.

I do believe in guardian angels, particularly since my Grammy died back in 2002.  I don't remember if she told me this, or if it materialized as part of my 12-year-old mourning process, but I firmly believed--and still kind of do--that she's got an eye out for me.  Although now I'm a bit more convinced that she is the center of the celestial social scene, frequenting all the same parties as Jesus and other prominent biblical figures.  Not that she can't still think about me and the rest of her family down here on Earth at the same time; she's always been good at not making anybody feel forgotten.

These days, though, I'm less convinced that she is my one and only Guardian Angel.

I think I just snatched the wings off one of the mosquitoes.

"Most people don't know that there are angels whose only job is to make sure
you don't get too comfortable and fall asleep and miss your life." - Brian Andreas

I have never been into current events.  Whenever we had to "do current events" for a social studies class in high school my tactic was usually to dig the past week's newspapers out of the recycling bin and skim headlines for buzzwords and topics I could stretch to fit the given parameters.  I completely missed the start of the Great Recession in 2008, and only found out about it because Tom Williamson brought it up in Anthro Theory one time.  Actually, most of the current events I knew about in college were news stories Tom Williamson shared in my various Anthropology courses.  I've spent years mumbling excuses for not watching or reading the news in any of the various available mediums: online, on TV, or in print media.  And yes, I'm a little defensive about it.

These days, though, I'm pretty up-to-speed.  I listen to NPR in the mornings because I miss having Granpa in the house and it makes it easier to pretend that he just left the radio running while he went to fix my car or something, filling the time before his porridge cools down enough to eat.  I am obsessed with blogs--even other people's blogs, believe it or not, and some of those people write about what's going on in the world.  Current events come up in the office, as everybody has their niche for hot topics: we've got our tech, sports, international atrocities, commercial development, and pop culture people.  Not to mention all the stories that show up in my social media news feeds or get featured on HuffPost's Twitter feed.  And yes, those trending stories and viral content.  If you read Mashable or anything like that you already know that traditional news outlets are allegedly being crowded out by social media, and I Am The Reason Why.

If you've visited Facebook at all in the past week, or listened to NPR this morning, you also know about Invisible Children and their Kony2012 campaign.  (Watch the focal video here.  It's about a half hour long.)  For me it was fascinating to watch the progression of this topic: In the morning, according to Facebook, "12 of my friends had posted this video" with captions like, "SHARE THIS WITH AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE!  THIS MAN MUST BE STOPPED!"

I watched it, finally, and from the point the filmographer mentioned his "African friend" I was on edge.  The way the story was presented raised all my little ethnographic red flags, the ones signaling "paternalism," "manipulated information," "colonial residue," so on and so forth.  But the story also hit me in the empathy, which simultaneously made me more skeptical and also got me thinking about alternative solutions.  Mostly I felt like the people telling me the story didn't really have a full grasp of it themselves.

At around 7 minutes, I saw a Facebook post alerting me to "another side of the story," and I'm suddenly riled up: "OK, you're seriously going to take Kony's side on this?!"  But it was actually just questioning the premise of the film.  And suddenly the whole issue gets veiled in greys.

And by the afternoon, people were revoking their posts, posting counterarguments, some very vehement.  By the next morning, the authors of those counterarguments were backing off in response to aggressive backlash against their articles.  And by the third day, the middle-of-the-road, pros-and-cons, positive/negative takes were spreading around the social networks.

My condensed reading list on Kony:

• This one really speaks to my concerns about paternalism, "progress," charity and advocacy:  "Bad development work is based on the idea that poor people have nothing.  Something is better than nothing, right?"  Uhh... well...
• A pretty well-balanced article from a blog I tend to ideologically align with, more or less: A Partial Defense of Invisible Children's Kony2012 Campaign

Invisible Children's Kony2012 video is still in the top 10 trending videos on YouTube, but the sensational reaction has toned down somewhat.  The initial explosion of gut reactions, the desired result of the video, has died down and dialogue is rising from the ashes.  Some of it still gets heated, but it's talk.  It's a little more level.  And while the conversation is far from over, other things leak in to shock us anew for another day or two.

And the thing that is intensely disturbing to me now is the gathering tide of what I'll call dishonorable incidents in Afghanistan.  My friend Alex put it very poignantly on Facebook today:

Can anyone doubt that the "good fight" has ended? That the lines of victim and perpetrator have blurred beyond recognition? That we have at stake something far more important than "justice" "democracy" or "strategic concerns"--that in this fight we are losing our very humanity? In short, can anyone now doubt that the war is lost?

Like I said, I don't normally get into politics, and those of you who know me know this.  We don't really talk about politics or macro-level news items.  But there are some things going on in the world lately that fall into the realm of "political discussion" that I can't, in good conscience, ignore.  I find myself saddened and discouraged by the political weight that falls haphazardly all over what seem to me, simply and irrevocably, human issues.

The angels who keep us from getting too comfortable seem to be doing their job all too well, but I don't believe that I am the only one with a guardian angel.  There is no way I'm the only one shadowed by someone, or something, who cares what happens to me.  Someone who wants my endings to be happy.  Someone who wants my middles and beginnings to be happy.  Someone who wants me to survive another day, another night, another adventure.

Isn't that what a guardian angel does?

But we live in the world, and the world is full of unhappy and unfortunate and painful things.  Guardian angels have a tough job.  Maybe some are more attentive than others; maybe some just had an easier setup from the get-go.

I think my guardian angel gives me, more than protection: encouragement.  My angel--angels--keep me from losing my momentum.  They keep me believing in myself, and believing in good things, and believing in happy endings.  They remind me to enjoy those happy moments instead of dwelling on the Unhappy-Moments-That-Could-Be.  They remind me that not all is lost just because everyone has known since Day 1 that Ben was going to choose Courtney.  They remind me to mourn loss of humanity over political loss.  I'm not at a point right now where I can take action, but I mourn still.

My angels love me in spite of my flaws.  In fact, they love that I am imperfect, and they love the imperfections in our relationships.  They love that I cry at dumb stuff, and at not-dumb stuff.  Angels mourn with us, and angels ache to help us and I don't think they always can.  But they are with us always and sometimes, that is enough.

choose your own adventure

Circa 4th grade I dove headlong into the Choose Your Own Adventure book series -- looking back, I suspect the Titanic installment of either initiating or fueling the Titanic obsession that carried me into middle school.  You might be right in diagnosing this obsession as incredibly morbid, and you might also be worried about a 10-year-old gleaning most of her historical facts from Choose Your Own Adventure novels.  Be comforted, please, by my complete awareness that these books were also, overall, not the best writing, and the fact that I read all accessible nonfiction accounts of all my morbid historical interests.

What captivated me about this series was the way it magically bestowed agency upon me as a reader.  These books consumed much more of my time (until Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone) and my mental capacity, as I meticulously and mathematically calculated every possible storyline, and how many different storylines were contained in each separate installment.  I probably read every page several times: the first time through, I'd seriously consider each decision within my personal moral-logical framework.  I'd read through at least once more, depending on how interesting that particular story was, making different illogical or immoral choices (things were much more black-and-white back then).  And finally I'd read the whole thing cover to cover, even though it was disjointed and out of order.  I just marveled over the way the whole thing fit together, its intricate construction, and the way these words were set in print but still so explicitly subject to change.

I hadn't thought of this series in years, until today.  It's been playing over and over in my head all afternoon, and then I remembered something Marija told our senior seminar that I swore I would not forget: "It's up to you to take initiative, say hi, meet people, be friendly, invite someone out for lunch or coffee."  It's up to me.

Since sophomore year when I first started really being intentional about my attitude, I've settled into a much healthier and more realistic balance: I can't hold myself responsible for everything that happens to me, but to an extent I am accountable for how I respond to these things, and to an extent I fit into a system that moves of its own accord, that responds to itself and to everything I do.  Complex.  And thanks to the 10+ years since I devoured Choose Your Own Adventure novels, my moral-logical framework has smudged into a meteorological phenomenon somewhat resembling a cumulonimbus.

Mostly I don't think about it as I go about my daily business.  Separation of philosophy and life, baby.  (Like church and state, I'm not entirely sure how possible this is -- like anything, really.  But philosophy, in my experience, too often induces paralysis.)

And here I am, getting caught up in it.  I'll have you know this is all far more complicated than I'm trying to make it here.  If you only knew how many anthropological concepts  I resisted explaining on the basis of length and irrelevance!

What I'm really thinking about right now is throwing caution to the wind, concocting wildly improbable ways to celebrate my birthday, asking my coffeeshop crush for the scoop around Wilmo, teaching my grandfather how to dictate and send emails from his iPad, finally getting comfortable enough to break the safety net of routine I set up for myself in this place.

I'm going to leave you with a somewhat related, and very cheesy-profound, exchange from the movie The Perfect Score, just because it struck me.  You can figure out how it relates.

Roy: "A lot of people think these questions are difficult."
D: "Not you?"
Roy: "Nah... These questions all have answers."