Buses are cool

Everyone is talking about this, sharing it, and posting it, and damnit, I want to too!!

R

Gardening

You all know I'm obsessed with The Plant (a local urban vertical farming venture here in Chicago). But it made me want to really start a garden in my own place even more when we ate fresh edamame I picked from the outdoor garden last time I was there. Of course because of that I got into looking around at gardening ideas for an apartment and this one might just be one of my favorites! The article on GoodMagazine's blog talks about some other ideas, but this is the main focus. I think I could do it... I might need to borrow a drill or something, but I could set something up like this, I wonder if my landlord will think I'm crazy!

Also I just want a little shout out to this couple in Quebec and so many other people all over who are fighting to keep their gardens! I think if we want to garden in the city why should we not be allowed to?! Not only is it good for the soil (when done right) it helps reduce the dependence on imported goods and gives the city an amazingly eclectic style!  Good for you.

Here's a quick urban planning type article about urban agriculture too. I recently passed a community garden in my neighborhood (only a block from my new apartment!) and this makes me think that perhaps the small community garden helped to revive Pilsen, or that more could continue to revive it. There are definitely some empty lots nearby and I would love to start up a community garden. Maybe I should start working toward that for next season.

I like the article writer's point at the end that "We should celebrate the power of local projects like community gardens—but in doing so we should not forget that there are systemic problems in our economic and political systems that contribute to the desperation in certain urban centers. A green thumb alone can't get to the roots of gun violence".  It's true that community projects can help to bring people together and bring some peace, but it is not the fix-all problem. Similarly, I love that this man lived in the neighborhood and conversed with friendly neighbors, acknowledging that gang members are people too, they have families and friends and they continue to live their lives normally (mostly). I think media portrays these people not as people but as evil beings. If we start understanding their lives as they relate to "normal" life, maybe we will be better able to understand why someone ends up in a gang in the first place and where the root problems are, rather than fighting the gang as an evil being itself.

R

We live alone...or do we?

Klineberg writes more on the topic of Americans living alone

Recently, apartmenttherapy.com reviewed an article about Americans living alone.  The review seems like a more modern look at the situation.  The original article is an overview about how to deal with living alone and how this will affect the community of senior citizens who have lived alone for much of their lives, whereas the review discusses more how it affects the community in a positive way and introduces a short pro vs con list to consider.  Most of the comments, as well as in the article, people seem to think that safety (in an emergency) and financial stability are the two main advantages to living with someone.  A roommate helps with the safety part and less with the financial stability part than a partner.  The disadvantage of having a roommate (of whatever sort) is mainly personal freedom.  They also have some cool facts, like half of america is single and one third of households are single-occupancy households.

I realized that we (R & S in particular, but all of our siblings in general) have the best of both worlds. Each of us (S first and R more recently) have depended on the other for financial support.  S lived with R for one year, rent free, S made her bank account available for R to use as she needed.  Obviously S took a little of R's personal freedom...bunk beds make it a little awkward to have a boyfriend over, but, on those nights, the couch was very comfortable. Now we are living individually and know we can depend on each other for financial support.  We also talk to each other every day, at least a few texts each day, so if anything happened we would quickly realize the other needed help.   I don't think living alone provides the same social structure, we have to force ourselves to not become hermits and to get social interaction...not that that is too hard. And, we do it with financial stability and safety.  Maybe everyone should get a twin instead of a partner!

New York's planned micro apartments

Generally, it is becoming easier to live alone.  Bloomberg recently announced a plan to build an entire building of 'micro-unit',  300 square foot, apartments and there are similar plans in Boston and San Francisco.  

On another note: If you google living alone, most of the pictures are of depressed people, we need some people in there who are enjoying their personal freedom!

S

Feminism

I recently bought a book that is described as a "feminist memoir" of a woman in her mid 30s living in London. This book is amazing, and, while I always identified myself as a feminist, makes me want to stand up and start really acting on it. I want to write a book about what feminism is to me too! I don't always agree with this woman, she makes valid points, but I think that is part of what feminism is about.

She spends about 5 or 6 pages discussing underwear, complaining about thongs and bras (though, she is very adamant about bras being our friend and that she loves her bras, even though they hurt) and I like thongs (I remember when I didn't) and I think bras don't have to hurt if you buy the right ones, so I think that though she is in full support of "big undies" as she says, I prefer my stance to be that I am in full support of people who want to wear big undies wearing big undies. I think that feminism has been popping up all over the place lately too, and I want to jump on that bandwagon and scream about it to all of my friends, family, and random people who are willing to listen to me!

This article in GoodMagazine (yes, still one of my favorite online magazines to read) talks about why we need feminism and other articles that I've read recently discuss the issue that fewer and fewer women are identifying with the term feminist. I think that the term feminist needs to have a looser definition than what people associate with it, and I think one way to start working on that change of definition is to start talking about it. I also think that maybe we need to keep some of the aspects currently associated with the term, maybe we NEED a little bit of the loudness, and the brashness with the term. Women are making less than men, women are pushed into certain jobs and certain tasks because of their gender, and (yes) women are sometimes hired for their looks or NOT hired for their looks (as are men, I know). We need to start acknowledging that some of our struggles are not JUST about female freedoms and male/female equality, but about human equality.

In the spirit of the GoodMagazine article: I need feminism because it's who I am, and who I want to be.

R

People walk differently in different places

We just got back from a trip (well, a few days ago) and it was so much fun.  We were pedestrians and we rode buses, planes, and trains, and we even took a boat.  People were all traveling and walking differently and speaking different languages with different accents.

First we went to Beijing China (a 12 hour flight).  R went a few days earlier than S and she flew to Toronto and then over Canada to Beijing, with a 13 hour flight.  S flew to Seattle and then to Beijing on a 12 hour flight.  She didn't stand up the entire flight and swollen ankles were the result, nothing painful though.

R explored the city on the first day with our friend and visited the the zoo, Temple of Heaven, and the planning museum the next day (without S).  The planning museum was really cool, they have a model of the entire city with the tallest building being about one foot tall.  You can see the traffic flow and the building layouts.  They built a lot of new buildings for the olympics and you can see how they shaped them like dragons and how they used the building locations to direct people toward the stadium and other away from less touristy areas.  At the zoo the animals were kept in cages without any greenery to ensure good visibility, it was a little depressing seeing the animals in such unfriendly cages, but was a fun experience.

With some of our fans on the Great Wall

The first day we were both there, we visited the great wall and that's when we became celebrities, well at least we felt like we were, many people wanted to take pictures with us, we had them take the pictures with our camera too.  The train ride to and from the Great Wall was about an hour and there were farms along the way, right next to the train tracks! That night we had Peking Duck, which was good, but S's favorite dish from that night was a tofu salad made with green onions, cilantro and something salty (probably just MSG sprinkled over the top, but I don't want to think about it).  R's favorite dish that night was a pork dish with a sweet-ish sauce, served with green onions and cucumbers on tofu sheets (you were supposed to wrap the pork and vegetables in the sheets, we didn't like them much so we used the tortilla-like ones they gave us for the duck with the pork too). Good thing we had Veronica there to order for us, we would have been lost!

S decided she needed to join some people while they napped
in the Forbidden City

The next day we ventured out alone again to Tiananmen Square.  We took pictures with strangers again. We asked a Chinese guy who was about 22 to take our picture for us and once he was finished he asked to have a picture with us.  He got between us and we all stood there kinda awkwardly until his aunt yelled 'WAIT' (or something like that in Chinese) and went up to us and put his arms around us...he looked like a pimp. Then we went to the Forbidden City (or Palace Museum), which is right next to the square, this is where the emperors lived with their concubines, empress, and servants.  It was fun to hear about the different emperors, but we don't know enough about Chinese history to have known a lot of the implications the automatic guide would say stuff like 'in the Qing dynasty the emperors stayed here for their summer court' and we have no idea what kind of significance that has so we didn't pay too much attention. There were some interesting stories though, about the emperor who didn't make any of his own decisions and instead the empress had a throne set up behind him with a yellow curtain between and when people came to ask him for something she would tell him what to say.  There was also a story of an emperor who had to marry his cousin to try to bring the family closer, but she was really ugly (with a hunchback and thin hair) so they were married but pretended to be strangers so she lived a really lonely life and 'died of loneliness' but after he died and she got to appoint the next emperor (maybe she killed him to get power...who knows). One of the most interesting parts about these parks were that people would spend the entire day in there because there is not much green space in the city. There were people with picnics and napping on the benches (of course we took pictures of the nappers). But the best part is that there are always people selling ice cream in the street, there is no shortage of that!

Our favorite proverb, and I'm pretty sure R is wearing that hat wrong
(for the record, no, I'm not wearing it wrong, there is never a wrong
way to wear one of those hats!)

Then we crossed the street to a park that overlooks the Forbidden City and climbed some stairs where we found the best Chinese proverb (as you can see in the picture).  At the top of the overlook you can see the entire city and the Forbidden City.  We met our friend and one of her friends there and then went to dinner.  We met a bunch of Veronica's Chinese friends (only some of whom spoke English) for dinner and we spent the evening giggling and gossiping in the corner while they caught up.  They all commented to her about how nice it was to not have to entertain her American friends.  We ate lots of lotus root and fish balls that night (well, R didn't touch the fish balls) and may have eaten some unidentified meats, but they all tasted good.

On the pedal boat at Summer Palace, S felt so powerful steering.

The next day we went shopping and bought cheap shoes that warn us to 'keep away from intense meat', maybe referring to our meal the last night? Then we saw the Chinese acrobats, impressive and a little nerve wracking, they did a bicycle act where there were about 15 people on one bike while a girl pedaled around in a circle and one with 6 motorcyclists in a sphere, that one was stressful.  That night dinner was in a small restaurant near where our friend lives with lots of good chinese food, but none that stood out as the best.  R and our friend picked out all of the peanuts while S ate the whole cloves of garlic in most of the dishes. We went to the Olympic Stadium and saw some mega-segways (I don't really remember what day this happened so I'm just sticking it in here hoping no one notices).  The next day we went to the Summer Palace where we rented a pedal boat and pedaled around the lake while eating lobster cheese chips (gross) and seaweed pringles (S liked them, R and Veronica said eww) and some other good Chinese snack food.  That night we made hot pot at the apartment.  We bought lotus root, fish balls, cilantro, 3 different kinds of mushrooms, spinach,  and other vegetables for the dish, then we made our own peanut sauce (well, ok Veronica's boyfriend made it) and ate hot pot.  Basically you boil water with some oil and spices in it at the table and put stuff in as you want to eat it.  I think S ate all of the lotus root, and R kept going back for the broccoli.  Then we had McDonald's deliver McFlurries to us (YES, they deliver by bike 24 hours a day, what?!) and had to run to the train to get to the airport on time for our 1am flight out.

There will be more to come about England soon!
S and R

Sleep

Recently I have felt like my life is spiraling out of control, as much as it ever is at the end of a school semester, but almost more because this is my last semester in school. Every time my life begins to careen into crazy, I grasp for a schedule, and force myself to stay up late enough to sleep at my normal time as I fight exhaustion from waking up earlier. However, this sleep schedule and stress makes my actual work time so much more unfocused than I am used to. Typically I am a very productive person, I amaze people with how much time I can spend volunteering, or talking and yet still get my work done. But with a crazy schedule I start to realize where their amazement comes from.
As much as I cling to a schedule that I have artificially assigned to myself (usually I aim to be in bed by 11 PM and wake up at 730 AM) I wonder if perhaps my most productive time is not a typical 9-5, or perhaps that I am not allowing myself the right amount of sleep. After reading this article about how making sleep a priority made the author's life so much more enjoyable, even if more time was spent sleeping I began to wonder what would happen if I started a similar schedule. I have found, at different times of my life, that either early morning or late night seem to be my most productive. I'm not sure if I attribute that to the fact that no people are in the office at this time, or that I feel the pressure of a deadline, but either way, those times are my most productive.
I began to think about how to determine my most productive period, and how to take advantage of it. But also, I need to allow myself to sleep and awake without an alarm clock. Luckily, school is almost over so I will soon be allowed the freedom of allowing my sleep schedule to adjust itself. Most of my jobs in the past have allowed me to work a fairly flexible schedule, and I hope to be able to grasp that at a new workplace as well. My current boss insists that we are in the office for most of our hours between 9 AM and 5 PM, which is normal, but as this article states, not everyone's productive period is between 9 and 5.
Different people have written about finding and correctly utilizing the most productive hours of your own day. This post I find to be interesting, because this blogger does not discuss the productivity so much as job productivity, being unemployed, but as life productivity. I find that with a schedule I can function well and be productive, as long as I get enough sleep and run it can almost be any schedule, but maybe I will one day find my balance and become my productive self.

Of course.. I write this as I am supposed to be working on a homework assignment... therefore, tonight I will probably not get enough sleep, or the right hours of sleep, but I will make due and soon I will be able to allow my body to regulate itself!

R

Family planning, population control, and birth control access

I've always been appalled by doctors sterilizing women without their permission.  Uzbekistan is doing it today and many other countries have forced sterilization for specific regions and races within their country.  One of my friends recently switched birth control and we were looking up different types of birth control.  I read about the progesterone shot that said doctors used to give the shots as a way to prevent African Americans from having children without them knowing.  Melinda Gates gave a TEDX talk where she discussed the desire of people to have smaller families as a way to have an increased standard of living.  If you have fewer children, you can afford to pay for all of their educations, you can afford to feed all of them, and you can continue to work because you don't have to stay home to take care of so many children.  She urges increased access to birth control for all women so they can decide to have smaller families.  People do not want to be sterilized, nor do they want to have children who they cannot support. 

Mechai Viravaidya  discusses birth control in Thailand with a more humorous twist.  He discusses Thailand's campaign to decrease population growth by providing easier access to condoms.  There is a super hero named Captain Condom who visit universities, the police hand out free condoms on the streets and they use witty advertising to encourage people to use condoms as a way to control population naturally.  He also says he will be handing out condoms after his talk but warns "these are Thai sized, so be very careful".

So, use birth control, unless you want a baby now.

S