This is a little awkward, blogger...

Because I may have moved on from you.
Don't hate me..?
We can still be friends, right?
I still need my entries saved somewhere?
Well, not most of them, which I backdated on Wordpress.

Come on, we both knew this wouldn't be forever, Blogger, can't you just--OK, just kidding..
here's my new Web site for the independent study I am doing. slash my life because basically this topic is my life as it is part of my internship/job/2 classes/general interest etc.

TA DA! http://localfoodiefight.wordpress.com

Get it? Like, I'm a foodie, and I like local food, and food fight, and there's a constant food fight going on in the world of big ag vs. local ag..........yeah whatever, it's not easy coming up with a blog name ok!?

Big changes...

Well. Not exactly big changes yet, but soon there will be, hopefully. I am negotiating with Mother Earth to see if she will switch to a longer rotational pattern around her axis, because it turns out I need more than 24 hours in each day in order to get done everything I need to get done. Not sure how she will respond to my request, but I will let you know.

In the meantime, I may just link from here to some other blogs I write, because I've got a couple others going on what with the classes I am taking and the internship I am doing. Eventually, I may phase out this blogspot and move myself over to Wordpress with a bigger focus on local food specifically. OK, this isn't really a "may" so much as I'm not sure when I will be done getting the site ready. But when I do, you betcha I'll direct you there.



ANYWAY. Go check out this ridiculous video from Nat Geo on what it takes to make plastic bottles that get "recycled" into polyester clothing over in China Food & Water Watch's's blog response to it.

Shorter, sweeter, less ranty: I have a lot of debt

Upon waking up this morning, I decided I need to keep up with this blog better, which will entail shorter entries, entries that don't delve into the most inner innards of my inner-self and take me 3 hours to write and leave even me scratching my head wondering what I am getting at.

Therefore, here is something positive from Obama's Middle Class Task Force remarks yesterday:

Biden: The fourth thing is we're going to be strengthening the income-based repayment program for student loans -- fancy way of saying a lot of kids and families graduate with significant loan responsibility and literally -- literally are left with very few options. They've got to go out and get the highest-paying job they can, maybe in an area they had no intention of working in, just to pay back the loan.

Today the average debt of a graduating senior from college -- now, listen -- the average debt -- people of my generation -- the average debt is $23,000. That is literally $2,000 more than my first house cost. But in any standard, it's a lot of money -- average debt. Some are graduating with a great deal more debt than that.

So our proposal ensures that Federal Student Loan payments for overburdened borrowers are never more than 10 percent of their income -- a change like that makes a real difference for a kid just out of school. For someone who earns 30,000 bucks and owes $20,000 in loans, this would lower his or her monthly payment from $228 a month under the standard repayment plan to $115 a month. People who have to budget every day just to get by, they understand that's a big difference. That's a big difference.

This is great news, or a great, "remark." I just checked on my student loan just now to see if I perhaps came in under this national average of $23,000, and I found out that I do!-- by about $263 (including interest that's already accumulated). They say student loan debt isn't really bad, but it's hard to feel good about it, for sure. I can't imagine where I would be without the $18,000/yr scholarship I have. Definitely not at AU, that's for certain.

Can we just talk about this for a second: Where do I have to move in this world if I want to buy a house for $21,000? I will seriously consider this.

Maybe I could live the simple life in Costa Rica...anyone want to move to Costa Rica with me?



How far in student loan debt are you? More than the national average or less?

I should rename this blog to, "From Just Outside the Peanut Gallery: here are my rants"

I was kind of hesitant to bring up this topic in this blog, mostly because I still haven’t decided where I am going with this blog. I don’t know who reads it or if they care about my personal life tid bits, but I kind of thought that was what blogs are all about. In fact, I love reading blogs about personal life tid bits. I mean, they should incorporate real world stuff, or helpful things that readers will be able to use, but they should also have a personal edge.

Anyway, what I am getting at is I feel like I might be embarking on my quarter life crisis. Which is disheartening, because I aspire to live until I am at least 200 years old, (but I am going to make 200 years look good. Seriously.) So, if I am already hitting my quarter life crisis, that means I am only going to live until the age of 88. That is not long enough.

Ahem, correction: I feel like I might be embarking on my one-eighth life crisis. (Ahh. Much better.) What I mean by this is I am starting to doubt and wonder about everything I have done thus far in life. Am I on the right track? What is the right track? I mean, we are all sort of born into a life track, and then we hit college, and then we begin doubting everything we ever were taught or brought up to believe in, everything we always thought we were so god damn sure about. Which is really just scary, because it's like, well, if I feel this different now than I did when I was 15, what is stopping me from feeling completely different when I am 27 compared to now? Can we ever really believe in what we believe in? (Note to self: strike two with the woe-is-me existentialism.)

For example, I was raised in a conservative family. My parents were always and still are Republicans. So when I went to register to vote down in Florida when I was 18, I registered as a Republican (you can’t register Independent, or else I would have done so.) It just seemed…correct? Politically correct?

Now, every day it seems my political views begin to lean more and more left. I am fiscally conservative (but not exceptionally) and socially liberal (on most issues). But really, when it comes down to it, I don’t want to be either. I think partisan politics is a bunch of bullshit and I hate that we have to put ourselves in a box that isn’t even properly made. I think (some) politicians are corrupt. I want to live on Pandora and be a Navii.

I also have begun to question my religious beliefs as of late. I was raised Catholic, but stopped attending church with my parents in high school around the time when that Catholic Church sex abuse scandal blew up in the media. Now, my parents are still both quite religious, however they still don’t attend church regularly. The last time I attended church was in Brisbane. I will say that it was an eye-opening experience at the time, perhaps even life-changing in ways I can’t really articulate currently. And yet, I still play with the idea that I might actually be an atheist. I might actually believe that when you die, you just die—the world goes on without you in it just like when you weren’t born yet.

This leads to my most salient inner debate: Why should I bother caring about the world so much? Is there a purpose behind my attempts to understand the global food crisis and how we can make our food production more sustainable? Is the world really going to come to an end in my lifetime? Wouldn’t it be more enjoyable to live in ignorance? And especially if I didn’t believe in God or an after-life, why should I care about the planet that will remain after I am gone?

Yeah, these are some real questions. They dig pretty deep or whatever. But the more I learn and the more people I talk to and the more I live, the more the answers to the questions begin not to necessarily matter.

I’m definitely “in flux,” as a friend recently told me. But maybe we’re always in flux. Maybe that’s kind of the point.

Like, OK, here is one last example. I grew up HATING cats. HATING. Once, a cat attacked me and it traumatized me for the rest of my life (so I thought), and on top of this, I'm also pretty darn allergic to them.

Then a couple months ago, my friend/apartment building-mate Charlie decided to get a cat, so I put on a sour face for a few days. Then the little guy, named Tito, started trying to be all cute and cuddly and handsome and then next thing you know he became the first cat I ever loved. Just look at that face:



Once again, this blog post has somehow turned into a non-conclusive rant that ends with a heart-warming picture (yes, I just suggested that Dunkin Donuts cups are heartwarming).

Help me out here. Is it normal to be in this state of flux when you are a 20-something-year-old, getting ready to join society IRL? Or are we supposed to feel all conflicted like this forever--and should we want to?

Twenty-four hours.

It's probably ironic and ill-timed that I am choosing to write about this topic now, at this moment which is the Monday morning after a completely non-productive weekend spent socializing with friends and avoiding schoolwork or any serious thought whatsoever like the plague. However, it was a wonderful weekend, and I can honestly say I feel refreshed and invigorated. Weekends like that remind me why life is so good. I've also got a photo album full of me and my friends dressed up as members of the Jersey Shore cast, so the weekend was far from a total loss.

Ethan Klapper: "Why do you guys keep talking about Paula Dean?" ... "PAULY D!" On the 1's and 2's.

Yeah. Anyway.

I met with my independent study advisor, Terry Sankar, who is my life-coach/green-guru/inspirational-professor. Previously my Practical Environmentalism professor, Dr. S has agreed to take me on in my journey to learn as much as I can about sustainable food production and draft some sort of paper that will detail how we can make it a reality. A practical reality. Like, one that will make everyone happy (except corporations like Monsanto but I'm actually quite positive they aren't real people. Or at least, they lack souls.) Dr. S actually thinks I will be able to get this paper I write published. I laughed when he said this and he looked me dead on and told me he was being serious.

Then he reminded me of this one class last semester where we had gotten off on a tangent (typical but always enlightening) and he said to us all, "Everyday, you wake up and you've got 24 hours of your own time to spend here on Earth. It's entirely up to you how you are going to spend it." One girl in the class put her face in her hands and then burst out, "That's so depressing!!" (I believe she felt this way, because we have only so many hours on this Earth, and the thought that we end up "wasting" so many of those precious hours is sort of frightening.) "But why?!" he replied. "I find it so liberating!" He told us how the thought that he is in complete control of his life, what he does, how he spends his 24 hours, one day after the next, makes him feel so powerful and free.

So he reminded me of that moment and told me to go into this independent study, to sit down to read and write, knowing that this is something I can eventually contribute to the world. To sit down and write with the intention of having my words read by others. With the intention of enlightening others, and making a difference in some small way. While the idea of this happening makes me feel so giddy and lit up inside, I'm not confident enough to think this is possible. But if Dr. S, (who designed this wind turbine, by the way) thinks that I can, I might just have to as well.

So you've got 24 hours, how are you going to spend it?

This post dedicated to Mr. Martin Luther King Jr., who sure as hell spent his time here on Earth making a difference.

My Yuppie Rant: Am I a yuppie-in-training?

I had a minor case of personality identity/stereotype crisis this morning. My roomie/bestie, Jen, told me I will one day make the great yuppie. This made me laugh, mostly because she said it in her typical “salty old man” voice. But then I got to thinking (not too hard, it’s still the first week of classes, mind you) and I thought, am I an aspiring yuppie? I mean, yeah, young, urban, professional—I qualify as two out of those three things. I shopped at Banana Republic the other day so maybe two and a half out of three on a good day. But otherwise, do I really fall into the soon-to-be-yuppie category?

Here’s me in a nutshell right now:
- I’m interning at Food & Water Watch, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group that helps to ensure clean water and safe food.
- I do yoga and shop at farmers markets.
- I am taking the following classes: Environment & Development, PR Portfolio (we are working with the Arlington Academy of Hope this semester), Theories & Methods of Nonviolence, and an independent study focusing on sustainable agriculture.

There is a definition that maybe comes sort of close to me, but is it yuppie?

Now, let’s take a look at my favorite Urban Dictionary definition of “yuppie”…

Acronym for Young Urban Professional. Group whose culture blends the hippie/counterculture values of the 60s and the materialistic monetary-based values of the 80s. Usually congregate in Starbuck's, Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, and a wide variety of vintage clothing boutiques. Includes both moderate Liberals (Majority of yuppies), and moderate Conservatives (smaller group of yuppies), although both the far left and the far right enjoy dissing them.

Far left dude: I hate these damn yuppies! They claim to be "artists" and "bohemians", yet their materialistic pursuits embody the very antithesis of the counterculture, and price real "artists" like me out of the neighborhoods they move to!

Far right dude: I hate these damn yuppies. I can't stand they flaunt their metrosexuality with their designer labels, lattes, luxury cars, and globally conscious health food stores. It's european-wannabe wimps like them that corrupt America!

In my marketing classes at AU, we learned heaps about how to how to define your audience. I once had an assignment where I had to “brand” myself. We learned how marketers segment their audience with Web sites like this, with 67 different ‘types’ of people. But even now, as I go through these market segments, I still can’t find quite the “yuppie” definition that I strive to find.

But bear with my existentialism for a moment, when I ask, can you ever really “define” a person? I mean, no, clearly, is the answer to that. Which is good. I mean, there are definitely people out there that fit the mold of a yuppie as defined above, but then you have to consider that not everyone agrees to this definition of a yuppie, or any other stereotype on Urban Dictionary for that matter. This one word alone has 45 definitions.

Jen asserted that perhaps what we have here is a case of regional yuppiedom. So, for example maybe a yuppie in Orange County is a 30-something, fashion-conscious, Whole Foods-shopping, Starbucks-addict. He “cares about the environment” (duh—he only buys organic!) and drives a Lexus HS250h, because he can afford it and wants to have a hybrid so he remains cutting-edge.

Or, maybe in D.C., the yuppie is a 30-something-year-old woman who shops at Whole Foods because she likes their selection of organic, healthy food, she still enjoys her Starbucks and her shopping, though she tries to not go overboard, because she’s sort of anti-capitolism. She drives a Prius, because it isn’t too flashy and is environmentally friendly.

I think you see what I am getting at here. I mean, in the grand scheme of the universe, these people are the same.

However, in conclusion, and because this yuppie rant has gone on far too long, I can happily say, I am not a yuppie, and do not aspire to be one, and in fact could never be one if I wanted to (despite the fact that I plan to eventually own a hybrid and yes I wear a Northface jacket and yes I do yoga and yes I own an Apple computer and yes I shop at Whole Foods.)

Despite all of this, my one saving grace is that I do not like Starbucks. At all. I was born and raised on Cape Cod, and I am a Dunkin' Donuts girl for life.

So there you have it, folks.

Lock the knee. Lock your eyes.

This week, I picked up my Bikram yoga practice again. I practiced Friday night, did Saturday afternoon, and am leaving for the Sunday morning class in about an hour. I practiced Bikram last fall/winter for about six months, but then stopped when I went abroad to Australia. There was actually a Bikram studio a few miles from my apartment down there, but I didn't really see having that much extra time or money to keep going, so I never kept it up. Then, last semester, my life was crazy and my class schedule, the Eagle, and babysitting just didn't allow for me to squeeze in yoga. It is a little bit frustrating to go back to Bikram after such a long break. I remember everything my body used to be able to do that it can't do anymore, and I am sort of mad at myself I let that happen. But, I don’t want to say I regret not going, because you can’t really regret something you had basically no control over. I missed it a lot.

This semester I have made room for it in my schedule to go three to four times per week, because with Bikram, (and most yoga), it is really important to go at least that many times, ideally five days. The more you regularly your practice, the more you get out of it.



Bikram yoga, also known as hot yoga by some, is basically a 26-posture, 90-minute routine developed by Bikram Choudhury. It is always performed in a room with a temperature of about 105 degrees and 40% humidity with the lights on bright. This allows your body to sweat out toxins but more importantly limbers up your muscles so you don't strain something while you are working on the pretty demanding poses. It is amazing how much more flexible you become after spending a little time in the heat.

I remember on my couple days of yoga back in August 2008, I looked around the room at all the ripped bodies, some curvy, some with not a drop of fat on them, but mostly all in great shape. Let’s just say you could tell who had been coming for a while and who, like me, were just starting out. I started to compare myself to everyone around me. Then the class began and I started to compare myself to how well my body was working compared to other people in the room. Then I remember during Ardha Chandrasana with Pada-Hastasana, which is a pose where you extend your arms with your biceps at your ears and push your body as straight as can be to each side, holding for a minute, then repeat again. It’s the first real pose aside from the all-important breathing exercise, but it’s intense. This excruciating cramp hit my right bicep (which isn’t used to doing any work) and then all I can remember thinking was, “Ohh, this isn’t gonna be easy, is it?” From then on I sort of knew I had to forget everyone else in there and focus on me. I perform my best postures when I completely free my mind of distraction and focus on my own eyes in the mirror. Which is sort of why I titled this entry that. There are a lot of phrases the instructors tend to use a lot, specifically, “Lock the knee!” “Push more! Fall more! Back back back!” etc. But I really like repeating, “Lock your eyes” to myself because it actually does help. I usually stand in the front, because if I can’t see my eyes in the mirror, I often can’t focus. If I concentrate on my own gaze, I'm not thinking about anyone or anything else, and I can work through some of the balancing poses a lot easier. The balancing poses are my hardest. I'm fairly flexible all around, but I can't balance for the life of me.

I think that is the beauty of most lasting exercise routines, specifically yoga, which is so individual. You do it for you, no one else. No one in there is going to pat you on the back and say, “You know, you had a really excellent triangle pose today, much better than last week!” because no one knows your practice except you. Sometimes instructors will encourage beginners with comments on how well they did, but generally it’s more of a comment to their stamina and staying in the room than specifics about their postures. Instructors are always there to motivate, but they are not what keeps you going. This is going to sound really cheesy, but it’s your internal dialogue and patting yourself on the metaphorical back that keeps you going. Sometimes it’s congratulating yourself for touching your head to the floor in standing separate leg stretching pose, sometimes it’s just for getting your butt to class. Or to play on what Emerson once said, “Finish each pose and be done with it. You have done what you could.”

I'm off to see what I can do today. Namaste, everyone.


(not Bikram, but me doing yoga in Brisbane, one of the only photos I have of me in any yoga pose.)

Happy Twenty-Ten. Here's the obligatory New Year list.

Well, actually two lists. They sort of address a smattering of my interests, categorizing them into things I hope go away and things I hope come about. Some is serious, some is not so much.

These are things I hope go away in the next decade:

Tiger Woods. Please go away. And while we’re at it, let’s also do away with all the celebrity gossip about famous men cheating on their wives. Not that I don’t think they all deserve to be ridiculed and publicly humiliated, but I frankly just don’t care. Actually, just all celebrity gossip and news should go away. I don’t know what we are going to talk about on Friday nights at the bar, but we will figure something out.

Twilight. And vampire stuff in general. I mean, I sort of got into True Blood, but I hated myself for it a little.

All the H_N1 hype. And yes, I am making the assumption that there will be another flu next year. (Hmm…Feline flu?) Next year there will be some other strain, I just hope the hysteria dies down a bit as time goes on.

Ugg boots. UGH boots. I can’t even believe how long these have stayed popular.

College binge drinking. We all love a cocktail/cold beer/glass of wine. Or two, or three. But, at the risk of sounding like my mother, the binge-drinking problem in America has become absolutely insane over the past 10 years. The CDC estimates that 75% of the alcohol consumed by adults in the United States is consumed in the form of binge drinking. Vehicular homicide, unsafe sex, date rape situations, yuck. I don’t expect binge drinking to disappear entirely, but it would be great if it did, and wasn’t replaced instead by an alternative drug. Happy, social drinking is in. Puking and waking up next to strangers, not so much.

Excessive spending. People need to save more and spend less. Banks need to stop lending money out to people with bad credit. This irresponsibility put us in a recession. Everyone needs to grow up.

Facebook. Bane of my Internet existence. Takes up way too much of my time and ultimately serves no purpose that other more legitimate social networking Web sites don't already have to offer. That being said, unless everyone else stops using it, I probably won’t either. Therein lies the rub. I mean, going into the PR field, I should embrace Facebook, but I just can’t help but have a love-hate relationship.

---

These are things I think and hope we’ll see over the next decade:


Better interactivity and involvement with personal health. Let me explain what I mean by this. So you go to the doctor, you get weighed and poked and prodded and then you are sent on your merry way, with nothing really tangible in hand, no record of your own so you can monitor your health. People need to have a better way of keeping tabs on things like their blood pressure and cholesterol levels, even things like birth marks on their body to make sure they don’t change too much over time. Doctors can easily miss things. Most of them are super busy, forgetful, or incompetent, and especially if you are going to multiple doctors, it would be fantastic if there was a more convenient way to just pop in all the information on your health into a central location online. Google is working on something like this, but it’s very difficult to work with and needs a lot more development. I would imagine that people would be nervous about this sort of transition, because you might think if all that information is out floating around in the interwebs, anyone will be able to get their filthy little hands on it. There would of course need to be proper security in place, this information would need to be protected just like our credit card information is all protected online. [Update: Yeah, this guy knows what I'm talkin' about.]

More widespread access to and knowledge of CSA’s and farmers’ markets. I actually dream about this kind of stuff.

Better pay for interns. Read: any pay for interns. And along with this, just more jobs in general. I’m a big believer in the economy turning around in the next few years. It’ll bounce back. I am fine with unpaid internships for college students just getting their feet wet in something, but it’s becoming a bit exploitative how much interns are being expected to do with no pay at many places.

Environmentally-friendly technology and products will become more affordable, available and mainstream. Hybrid cars will becomes the norm. Energy-efficient appliances will be the only kind you can get. Plastic forks will be replaced by bio-degradable forks made of corn—you get the idea.

Faster Internet connectivity, better battery power capacity (in all kinds of technologies), and advancements in data storage. Like, who would have thought five years ago that we would have a terabyte hard drive available for home use? Craziness I tell you. Maybe one day my Internet download speed at my apartment will surpass 3.32 Mbps. Sweet, can’t wait.

A renewed respect for journalism. Journalism has been going through a difficult transition as citizen journalism on the Internet has grown and newspapers have lost money and their workforce. But I see a transformation happening soon, where objective journalism will find a better place in society and people will realize its importance much more. Um, this is really vague. I'll blog about it later in more detail.

HDR high-dynamic range imaging photography will begin replacing traditional photography. I don’t even know how they would do this, but what if they made a camera that could? Oh boy. Can you imagine a world where HDR photos were everywhere? My head can’t even wrap around this concept. What a beautiful thing it would be.




Anyway, who wants to join me in this new decade? We can sit around sober, talk about our health and personal savings plans, and eat locally grown food with forks made of corn. No, but seriously.

Happy New Year, everyone.