ladiesbug my ass

photo credit here

the flippin weirdest thing happened yesterday. i was on my way to class, around 1 p.m., just walking on a typical autumn day, leaves falling, overzealous kellogg kids running my ass over on the sidewalk, busy networking or whatever the fuck they do, when something on my exposed collarbone pinches, and i look down at the same time as i reach to see what it is, and a fucking LADYBUG has just bitten the shit out of me, and then flits off into the sunlight.

what the FUCK? since when are ladybugs mean? i didn't run through a meadow of ladybugs and disturb its habitat or anything. if anything, it should've bitten those obnoxious kellogg students, not some innocent-though-stupid medill student who's going to make shit for a living after shouldering massive amounts of debt.

i mean, really. that ladybug was pissed. i have a welt, now. and more importantly, i'm puzzled. should i expect ladybugs to be menacing from now on? they are the one species i won't smash if it's caught in my habitat or on my person, but damn, if they're going to go around biting folks i might have to re-think that.

go giants!

watching game 6 of the NLCS championships (GO GIANTS!) for those of you living under a rock during the past week or so.

also, eating cookies that i just baked, reading back issues of the Times that i missed this week (i stack them up if i don't get through them and read them later. do you do that?), blogging and researching a paper due monday.

an actual paper, not a story.

i find that when i have lots of time to myself, i like to do about 47 things at the same time, each pleasurable in their own way, or mandatory by way of school.

i had a four-hour lunch today with two friends from school. an inadvertent occasion. we went by a place i'd seen on check, please! chicago, which looked good. picked up jesse and spence at their place (a 25-minute endeavor because i live in the sticks), then we went over to this restaurant.

CLOSED for catering, re-opening in 2 hours. we walked down the street (not the best neighborhood, therefore the most promising for good eats), and found a korean hole-in-the-wall that serves only soups of various kinds. spleen, tendon, tripe-filled soups. we had lunch there, but soup with veggies and a bowl of rice is not filling, so we went BACK to the original place, which was packed because of the airing on the show, and waited nearly 90 minutes for food. we were originally just going to order a shitload of lumpia to go, but a table opened up so we decided to order more stuff to try. fortunately, we weren't hungry like some of the other restaurant patrons, who got downright angry at the owner/manager.

you can't really feel bad for the hungry people; if everyone got seated at the same time, you're bound to wait for an hour to eat. the kitchen staff was busting they asses to get food for these people. it was BYOB, so after the first hour, the boys got the bright idea to go next door and get some oversized bottles of sierra nevada. we got our plates eventually, and they were pretty yum.

one of my theories in life is that islanders aren't that good at running businesses. i don't think this applies to all, of course, but if i had a dollar for every hawaiian restaurant owned and run by hawaiians that folded in under two years... i'd probably have a lot of dollars. i'm kind of extending this observation to all islanders, because i'm lazy in the brain and judgmental. i observed this owner guy today, and while the food was good and they surely hustled... who closes their restaurant for 4 hours on the weekend that their restaurant is featured very prominently on a local restaurant review show?! they had a catering event that morning, which i get, but perhaps separating the catering and the restaurant kitchen would be worth its while. or limiting the catering menu only to shit you can slam out in the wee hours of the morning before the restaurant opens for lunch. no?

tell me if you can figure this out

maybe it's the early hour, but i'm having trouble understanding the bar graph towards the top of this infographic. [click to enlarge. again, my blog template has column sizes that are too narrow for the full size, but the automated blogger sizing makes it too small. and i'm too lazy to crunch the image proportions by hand and adjust in html.]

do you get it? how can imports and exports worldwide vs. the U.S. yield such odd numbers? shouldn't the imports and exports be inverted versions of each other?

this infographic, and many others of outstanding quality, comes to you via mint.com's blog. mint.com is a great, free online service that helps people with their personal finances, to budget, reach goals, etc. i don't use the personal finance service (i keep meaning to, but, let's be honest. i live on student loans, so i know exactly how much i have to spend each quarter.), but i do subscribe to their blog. i find that it addresses financial issues that are more sophisticated than the average mass media outlet, but does so in a clear, easy-to-understand way, and often presents them in nice, modern formats like infographics for news nerds like me who like the digital stuff.

that said, i actually do know why the bar graph is yielding such odd numbers. if you look up worldwide coffee import/export numbers on a bloomberg terminal or a website that covers world economic trade numbers (morningstar might also be useful), you're basically going to get tonnage and dollar values for coffee producing around the world. if you graph them, they won't make sense, because of course it would be far too easy for the import/export numbers to be calculated in a straightforward manner.

i'm sure nothing in this post furthers the world in any positive way, but maybe someone out there can help me out.

gamboling about on the internets...

The Black Ivy from Street Etiquette on Vimeo.


if there was a degree to be earned on random treasure-hunting on the internet, i think i could bronze medal. or at least earn an AA degree. seriously.

today was particularly fruitful. one of my friends buzzed (he's one of three that still uses poor 'ol buzz) an esquire magazine infographic on pant sizes by american retailers, and from there i found a male-oriented blog about fashion and general outward appearance called Put This On. that lead me to many other things, but more importantly a video/slideshow/still photo project called The Black Ivy by joshua kissi and travis gumbs of the fashion blog, Street Etiquette.


it's gorgeous. the video production quality is beautiful (i have an appreciation for such things having shot a few shitty video projects myself). the people are gorgeous. it's enviously styled. i don't even subscribe to the prepster movement and i love this project.

if i had a cork inspiration board above my desk like i had most of my life, i would pin these stills up. one day, when i stop living as a gypsy or roma, i will.

ok, so maybe some people are right

so, my tribe (with few exceptions) consists of drum-beat worshipping, morning-growling, daylight-stomping coffee drinkers. i have never apologized for my coffee addiction; quite the opposite, i reveled in it. i celebrated it. i mocked people who did not understand its seduction.

makes your heart palpitate? excellent, it's working! jittery and unfocused? pthhhh, a noob. can't sleep at night? that's why people invented ambien!

oh, so glib.

after hell and back in six days without coffee, i jumped (ok, we all know me better than that. i probably slogged) out of bed at the crack of noon and joyously (alright, inscrutably and unemotionally) poured water from the brita into my coffee maker's water well. i carefully measured (i.e. dumped unceremoniously) peet's italian roast into the gold mesh filter. i hit "start," cackling and rubbing my evil hands together.

i knew my clean, fresh, innocent-pink bodily system should probably start off slowly, so both of my two cups were one-third soy milk. and here i sit, heart palpitating,

jittery and unfocused,

and likely unable to sleep for another 82 hours.

fuck.

i knew this morning that coffee probably wasn't necessary. i even considered tea. but the thought of abandoning my rite of passage into adulthood, my personal vice and source of solace, my morning ritual of reassurance was too much to bear. i had to start up again. no one was going to lead me out of the territory on a sled in the dead of winter and abandon my old ass to die alone. i'm a heart-thumping, hand-shaking, wild-brained warrior in this tribe.

detox days 3, 4, 4.5

eating to feel full. that's what just germinated in my gerbil brain as i sat down and tucked into a bowl of not un-delicious but somehow un-soul satisfying vegan lentil soup (lentils, onion, olive oil, tomatoes, vegetable broth).

that's what detox does for me. it unhooks my need for taste and karmic satisfaction from eating. when detoxing, i eat to fulfill bodily demands, not because i want to eat it or it's particularly interesting or tantalizing. i stop when i am full, which is a feat the unscaleability of which i cannot accurately express.

today, which is day 5, i woke up feeling alert for the first time since saturday. alert and with greatly reduced back pain. days 3 and 4 were defined by what i can only describe as crippling back pain. i spent over an hour last night stretching and downward-dogging and forward-bending in an attempt to ease the tension, which seemed to draw from the base of my spine and spider around my hips into my belly. leaning into the pain made it so acute i became nauseous. trev insisted that i stop this detox foolery and spend tomorrow in pursuit of a hamburger, and see the doctor. i insisted back that's i'd made a big pot of uninspiring lentils and was not about to waste it.

i'm glad i was able to name what it does, these seven days of torture.

an interesting viewing, 23 minutes

one of the professors teaching my capstone course - where i'll be working all quarter on what amounts to my final project for the program - is brent huffman. he and a chinese documentary filmaker teamed up on this project for al jazeera about chinese living in africa, and the existing tensions. it's pretty interesting.



or, you can watch it on al jazeera's website, here.

detox day 2

photo by Su-Lin

i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee. i miss coffee.


that said, i'm feeling a bit better now than i was for most of the day. might have to do with the 90-minute nap that randomly took hold of me this evening. i closed my eyes due to the caffeine-withdrawal headache, and suddenly it was almost 7 and i had nothing in the hopper for dinner.

this afternoon, i went to the school and spoke to the new students coming in this semester along with fellow students, and on my way back i kept forgetting that i was detoxing and considering dinner options:

"maybe i'll get a gyro."

doh!

"hmm, maybe i'll get sandwich."

doh!

"damn. i guess it's $*#%)^& quinoa again."

tonight i mixed it up and made this recipe, again from the best veg blog ever. brown rice instead of quinoa, yay. lots of garbanzos for protein, and i swapped in kale and artichoke hearts instead of asparagus. i also skipped the dressing and squeezed lemon over everything instead, which turned out quite yummy.

my dessert, if you can call it that, is a small glass of soy milk. and half a peach. i'm actually craving chocolate, which is rare. i'm not really a chocolate person.

from past experience and reading, it seems that day 2 is the toughest. last time i did this, day 2 was headachy and it just got worse from there. i'm hoping this time i'll be energetic starting day 3, like a lot of people say.

the thing that is striking to me is that i'm not eating stuff that i wouldn't ordinarily eat. i actually do eat quinoa with some regularity, and i eat brown rice exclusively, if i'm cooking at home. it's just that between those meals i have nice options like... noodles, eggs, a pork chop once in a while.

detox day 1

photo by Heather Ingram

so, it's that time again. no meat, dairy, caffeine, eggs, refined anything-time. this is partially tipped off by my three weeks at home, spent mostly eating and enjoying myself and my family and friends. i was actually pretty active during the three weeks, managing to hike, run, swim and even lift weights. i also just started to feel the need for a change, maybe because of the change in seasons? i'm not sure. i know i have been craving sweet potatoes and kale, which has got to be the weirdest craving i've ever had.

and... a couple of things happened in a row, namely: #1, i have eyes in my head and clearly i am not at my most svelte, and #2, those eyes in my head saw what the numbers said when i got on the scale in my mom's bathroom (i'm too broke and gypsy-like to have a scale).

so, off i go.

today was the first day back in the chi, so i went on an extensive grocery trip that involved the asian market and trader joe's. i managed to buy about 5 bags of groceries (mostly produce) from the asian market for $40. i managed to spend $65 on two bags at TJs. typical.

breakfast: oatmeal, peppermint tea
lunch: tofu, spinach, broth (lazy girl's soup)
dinner: quinoa, kale, tofu, roasted tomatoes, a recipe from one of my favorite food blogs

my fridge is stuffed full of chard, kale, spinach, tofu, grapes, peaches, cabbage, carrots and various non-dairy milks. i'm giving almond milk a shot. i also bought beans and quinoa up the ying yang for its protein.

i also bought the chicago groupon for this place. i'm curious to see if raw food is as nasty as it sounds.

whilst lost in the land of the internet...

i'm researching and writing a draft (due tomorrow at 10 a.m., way to go procrastinator) of a long-form story about the student loan market for the upcoming quarter. i stumbled across this infographic by collegescholarships.org and ByJess.net and thought i should share. (click on it for a readable version, my damn template has such narrow columns.)

it speaks for itself.



Infographic by College Scholarships.org

my summer

...is almost over. what do i have to show for it?

not much, but it's been fun. 3 weeks of seeing friends and my family and running amok in the streets, when i've felt like it.

i don't even have a single photo. my need to visually record my life has diminished significantly, i suppose.

i would really like one of these. i think it will help with the inspiration!

tee hee.

nighttime adventures

i just saw a very large lady riding a bike crash directly into a wall and wipe out.

???

i guess she just didn't see the wall? it is nighttime.

on another note, in the "free" area downstairs, someone has placed a box containing a broken car headlight.

what the fuck?

all this in a quick trip to 7-11 for some ice cream.

alicia keys isn't doing it for me

neither is adele.

i'm in-process of readying myself emotionally to write. i noticed not-so-recently that for me to produce creatively, i get the best results when i manipulate my own emotions. i have to make myself depressed in order to write something that i'm happy with. i usually deploy extremely emotional ballads to do the dirty work, then go to bed feeling very glum after an hour or so of typing.

this is probably fairly fucked up, but as creativity goes, i'm thinking a lot of people are the same way. aren't a lot of artists totally unstable? i'm not saying i'm van gough, but i think the creative process can be similar for a lot of people.

that said, nothing's working. my usual songs aren't working. is there such a thing as being too stable?

possibly said today

"and, jesse, where's he?"

"yeah, where is jesse?"

"he's drumming."

"drumming?"

"oh. still doing that?"

"yeah, drumming. with a cardboard tube on a... box. and miaowing."

"drumming and miaowing out the window."

"i see."

"he's just so good at it, the miaowing."

in defense of dating a dud

not a dude, a dud. a dud can be a dude or a dame.

it dawned on me while in the shower about 23 minutes ago that dating a complete booooo, thumbs-down, everybody-hated-him-except-my-mother guy really made me appreciate a couple of things.

first, and more obvious, is that it made me appreciate T all the more when he came along.

second, it made me embrace the full, unadulterated me because i gave so little of a shit about this guy that i basically said and did whatever i wanted. his only manipulation leverage was that he could make himself such a complete pain in the ass that i would do what he wanted (on rare occasions) just to avoid the burden of dealing with his tantrums.

i'm going to argue here that being completely selfish and self-involved in a relationship, while shitty for the other person, kind of helped me be me all the way. finally.

i've had trouble with this in the past. the one time my mom had me evaluated by a shrink, he essentially said that i grew up too fast and strove hard to be something i wasn't, which was actually very accurate. i think my mom just felt guilty from the point forward for indulging me when i said i wanted to go to school at 4 years old, thus making me a year younger than the others. i'm not really sure what to think about that nugget.

BD (before dud), i was never fully relaxed enough to express all of my opinions, let my tendencies bust out into the open. i'm a tomboy, i curse enough to make people uncomfortable, i'm logical to a point of emotionlessness, i have a horrible temper, i mistrust every single person on the planet except for like, 3 people of varying connection to me, the list goes on. in the past i've tried to be more stylish than i naturally care to be (stylishness takes effort, which i frequently don't have the energy for), i've tried to be high-maintenance (also takes way too much effort), i've tried to be girly and pleasant. ha. my pleasantness is derived from the fact that i'm deadpan and lazy and sleepy, not because i'm actually pleasant. it's a by-product if it happens.

PD (post dud), i was able to see how much i changed myself to make myself more likeable. that's some wack shit. sadly, it took me about 29 years to figure out how to be me.

part of my 30s loftiness comes from the fact that i have accepted my faults and am more-or-less comfortable in my skin. hats off to people who have had a steeper and faster learning curve. it's not an easy one.

A is for asparagus, P is for pizza!

photo credit

i had my most defining californian-in-chicago moment last week after the cubs game. my friend amy, who grew up in a northwest chicago suburb, was kind enough to invite me to a cubs game with a couple of her family members and friends. we go, and i manage to impress at least amy and the girl next to her with my double hot-dog and fries chowdown. and then after the game we go to a pizza place.

not any pizza place, mind you. this is a walk-in joint just a few steps from wrigley field, meaning it sees dozens if not hundreds of drunk cubs fans a few times a week (and, let me tell you, no one does drunk like cubs fans. maybe white sox fans). its specialty is pasta pizza, by which i mean pizzas that are topped with pasta dishes: tortellini, mac 'n cheese, chicken alfredo penne. after my hot dog duo, i thought i'd go light with a slice of the asparagus and potato pizza. after a couple of bites, i gave up. my stomach couldn't take it. i tried mightily to give my pizza away, but no one, not even amy's trash-compactor of a brother-in-law, would even touch my slice.


shit. in california, a pizza covered in asparagus and thin slices of yukon gold tater would sound like a spectacular idea, especially for the drunk baseball fan who wants to squeeze some veggies into her ballpark diet. in chicago, i became the pizza leper. i got "eewwwwwwws" in surround sound. it was brutal.

driving at night

jesse and i decided to go and get popeye's at 10 tonight. then we decided he should learn to drive a stick shift, which he did. and so we had late-night driving and chicken eating, giggling all the while.

on writing

i had an interesting conversation tonight which made me want to type further about it. yesterday, when my story was filed, i felt mostly ok about the fact that my lede and nut graf were re-written by my professor, joe, who emphasizes clarity over elegance. i like to strive for both, but probably write with less clarity than elegance. whatever. no biggie.

talking to a friend tonight about another classmate's writing, which she described as 'very narrative' - something she admired. something flashed in my head - not quite fully formed enough to be a thought, more like a determined note to myself in fetus form. i know that i'm losing my voice, to a certain extent, in being shaped to write hard news, but this bothers me less than it does others. i just don't care. there's no space for beauty in hard news ledes, you need to be clear and straightforward and present the facts. i think it's a good exercise for me, as i tend towards the willy-nilly school of getting to the point. but i think i can make a stronger case for retaining a sense of me. i need to stop rolling over during edits for the sake of getting the FUCK out of the newsroom before another massive headache comes on. 

i re-read the story i wrote yesterday (ok, i really just skimmed the first couple grafs) and it didn't sound like something i'd written, mainly because it wasn't. and it didn't bother me so much as made me decide that i should publish things i've written and be able to recognize the damn things, right? right. this i will work on. this i want to do.

off to bed.

a note about today

so, today was productive. i got a story idea just before noon from my professor, joe, reported the shit out of it and produced a story by around 4 p.m. i was impressed with myself. it involves a local manufacturer's role in the gulf oil spill cleanup efforts, so i was able to reach the manufacturer, the coast guard and BP in the span of a few hours, which was lucky.

joe was heavy-handed in editing the lede and nut grafs (the first paragraph and the 'graph with "the point" of the story) which i don't love, honestly. i put a lot of thought into word selection, i emphasize flow and language, and he emphasizes clarity. as he should, i suppose. anyway, enjoy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo credit: BP p.l.c.

Nalco supplies dispersant for oil cleanup effort 

May 11, 2010

Naperville-based Nalco Holding Co. is keeping up with the need for its chemical dispersant in attacking the huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The dispersant has been sprayed multiple times a day, a total of more than 325,000 gallons so far, over the oil spreading on the surface. On Monday the Environmental Protection Agency also conducted its third test of the chemical on the ocean floor, according to the Coast Guard.

The dispersant, called COREXIT, is being tested both for effectiveness and for impact on the Gulf’s water ecology.

The effect of using such a large amount of dispersant is unknown, according to Coast Guard spokesman David Mosley. The impact on sea life is a primary concern for the EPA in continuing tests.

COREXIT is a proprietary chemical compound made of organic sulfonic acid salts, a surfactant, and propylene glycol, a solvent, which breaks the oil into small droplets, making it digestible to ocean bacteria.

COREXIT is being transported via air from stock points around the world and via truck from Nalco’s Texas plant.

“We have been working very hard with our suppliers to get the raw materials,” said Nalco spokesman Charlie Pajor. “We have sufficient production capacity, so that is not a problem.”
The company declined to state the revenues generated from COREXIT shipments in the quarter, but stated that material information would be reported as required to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Nalco maintains that the dispersant underwent strenuous testing by the EPA before being approved for oil spill cleanups.

Applying the dispersant is one of many efforts made to lessen the impact of the gushing deep-water oil well spilling an estimated 5,000 barrels per day into the Gulf of Mexico. The leak was caused by an April 20 drilling rig explosion, which killed 11 people and sank the rig owned by Transocean Ltd. The deepwater well is located about 45 miles from Venice, La.

Nalco has shipped all available inventory to the cleanup site, and reported that it was receiving “great support” by its suppliers in turning around as much of the compound as quickly as possible, according to its chairman and CEO, Erik Fyrwald, during an interview by CNBC last Monday.

“Our focus is not on the business impact of this. Our only focus is to supporting BP and the government agencies in dealing with this crisis as best we can,” said Fyrwald. “This is a crisis that we all want to help make sure comes to a positive end.”

Nalco’s stock closed at $24.09 on Tuesday, down 0.21 percent or 5 cents after reaching a four-month high of $26.19 on May 3, which was the day CEO Fyrwald appeared on CNBC as well as on Fox Business News.

the elysium fields

such a lovely sounding grouping of words. one forgets that it refers to the somewhat unsettling concept of the afterlife, a final resting place for deserving souls, and not to the more modern concept of paradise.

while i certainly hope my grandmother is resting somewhere beautiful, where stand-in grandchildren bring her tea and cakes and massage her feet with lotion, i feel for myself there is no there there. (she would probably prefer somewhere noisy and filled with food smells and actual foods and a blaring cantonese-language tv program.) another reason concepts like heavens and green pastures were invented by the living - we need to feel that there was a higher reason for our loss, and like to lazily believe in the existence of lush fields, galloping horses, floating angels and other emotional associations with beauty and peace. the souls themselves could actually prefer sharper realities, like the funkiness of durian on a hot night, to spending eternity in a silky white robe, playing the harp.

been kind of mulling over the concept in the back of my mind tonight, thinking about my elysium fields. oddly enough, thinking long and hard on that blasted elliptical machine that i'm shamefully loyal to. there's not much else to do when your ipod is out of battery and an amateurish and actually quite nauseating cooking show is on tv while you sweat your way to penitence. as i work to be good and smart and faithful, will the shit just not matter in the end? i just want to say, 'fuck it' and be completely bad ass, bad and terrible all rolled into one.

it's just the lack of sleep talking. you probably don't understand what i'm trying to discuss with myself, and i don't blame you.