The No Bell Pizza Prize

Maybe I'm having a "don't you talk about my momma/Obama!" moment, but now I'm just getting angry.  Because while I'm upset over the lack of "change" going on right now, I can't take it anymore.  And since I just wrote about this particular subject to friends, I thought I would share it here.

Okay, I'm doing it: 

First of all--in response to criticisms that he received the prize just because he's "not George Bush"-- that's stupid.  No one on the list of peace prize laureates is like George Bush.

Moving on.  Why the uproar?  Has everyone who has received the prize in the past achieved great things by the time they were nominated, even by the time they received the prize?  More recently, Al Gore received the peace prize in 2007 (w/ the UN panel) for his work on climate change awareness.  Yet two years later, we have yet to see any comprehensive energy reform in the US, much less in the entire world.  Hell, we haven't even convinced everyone climate change exists.  I don't remember an uproar there-- "But, why Gore? He doesn't deserve it! It's all talk!  He hasn't done anything yet!" 

How about in 1964, when Martin Luther King, Jr. was awarded the peace prize.  By the time of his nomination, the civil rights movement had not yet won the Civil Rights Act, or the Voting Rights Act.  Furthermore, did he deserve the prize over the people in Alabama or Mississippi or North Carolina who spearheaded the movement rather than figureheaded it?  Let's not forget the efforts of Abernathy, or Robinson (to name a couple).  --"But, Dr. King? He just gave a nice speech in Washington.  He hasn't really done anything yet!  In fact, it's been years and no laws have been passed!"

I don't mean to downplay the achievements of these men or anyone else who has received the prize in the past.  But to pretend that this is the first time the award has been given to someone who has not yet achieved the successes for which they aim would be an ill-informed criticism.  And it's not like he nominated or chose himself-- he was just as shocked as anyone else, and said himself that he didn't deserve to be among the other winners. 
(What he said: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7bHkH779qg)

I am just as impatient as everyone else.  But when Obama says that this prize is a "call to action," I get happy.  Period.  Because, I'm sorry, he got elected.  No, no--rather, we elected him.  Let's not forget that, it's not a passive sentence, we performed the action.  And now what?  We are just sitting here, waiting to be transformed as a nation.  He told us to hold him accountable.  How many of us, how many of the people who elected him, are doing that?  Are we putting pressure on him to pass health care reform?  To pass immigration reform?  To pass energy reform?  No, but the minority of the nation is pressuring Congress not to, or at least not to pass it in the ways Obama said we'd see it. 

On that note-- have we forgotten that Obama doesn't make the laws? He doesn't write them.  He doesn't pass them.  If we want to see these things happen, and are angry that they haven't happened as quickly as we see fit, we are placing blame in the wrong place.  Maybe we should look at our Congressmen and Congress women.  Or, to get to the root of the problem, maybe we should look at ourselves.  Whose country is this, anyway?

But whatever.  It's easier to email/gchat/tweet/facebook message our friends about how he hasn't done anything yet. 

There.  There's some perspective for ya.

/rant. 

Someone's in the kitchen...

If you don't cook, you should.  If you do, go vegan.  It's a fun challenge.  One at which I've utterly failed as of late (Damn you, cheese and yogurt!  Damn you, lack of Whole Foods in the south!). 

Regardless, I've been enjoying my favorite snack-- sweetriot chocolate bars. Yep, they're expensive.  But they're also vegan, and dark chocolate.  Oh, and they're pretty friendly to humans and the earth in the process.

On that note, I've realllyyy been wanting to try this recipe.  If you can find the ingredients (yeah, south Charlotte sucks) you need to try this out, it's really quick and probably tastes like heaven: vegan chocolate mix.

Lastly, homemade focaccia.  If you are one of those freaks who considers yeast and honey and all that stuff non-vegan, then skip over it. 

That's all.  Oh, and Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize?  Let's not talk about it.  Why? Because there's nothing to talk about.  He hasn't actually DONE anything yet, that's true.  I agree with progressive.org on this one.   Or SNL, incidentally:

I think that it will give him momentum, and he has inspired people around the world.  So I'll give him that.  And I'd rather him get it now when he is trying to pass these laws and move towards peace, rather than after he got out of office.  Hopefully it will only help the causes over which I'm so unnerved (due to inaction).  I'll try to be a bit more optimistic.  But my cynical side sometimes takes over my pragmatic side when it comes to politics.  So if Obama truly takes this as a "call to action," as an expectation rather than an affirmation, I'm happy about it.

I'll be lightning

Alright, so now that I've been embarrassed by Peyton who, though inspired by me (among others) to create a blog, now updates about 20x as often as I do.

I don't even remember what my last post was about. So let me do a quick update about the things I have going on/am currently interested in:

I'm a research assistant working on analyzing immigrant youth trainings in FL and CO.  I'm also going to Boston soon to do some other RA work for my old Wellesley prof.  Dreamactivist.org = awesome.

I bought her book (now available in paperback, unfortunately not at B&N) which is about the process by which people become motivated and involved in the politics.  I may even be a super dork and ask her to sign it.

Supreme Court ruled that apparently selling videos of dog fights and animal brutality and such is completely protected under the freedom of speech (US v. Stevens, look it up).  Scalia says, what about the people who like dogfighting? A NYTimes op-ed says, it's true, we may hate racists but we can't stop Nazis from marching or the KKK from spewing racist remarks.  I say, true, but we don't allow them to sell video tapes of the Holocaust or lynching.  Because that means they committed a crime in order to make the video, am I right? Mkay.  And for money? Ugh.  Sick.

Apple, Inc. cancelled membership in the US Chamber of Commerce over their position in environmental policy.  Whether you love them or hate them, Apple took a positive stand for the environment, and that makes me happy.  Even if they do plan obsolescence.  Which is bad for the environment.  Their Forbes number was pretty low, too, on the list of "green" businesses.  Donahue says the US Chamber supports climate action, but not the Markey-Waxman version.  Which is really stupid, because cap-and-trade favors large, multinational businesses who can afford to buy more permits.  Duh, did they even read the bill?

In other news, I hate words like "green" and "organic" and "sustainable."  So dumb, and no one even really knows what they mean, anyway. 

Sen. Boxer (man, I wish I lived in a cool state where my senators DID something) is telling the EPA to do something about the water issue in public schools.  Good for her.

This health care stuff has got to go.  Two-thirds of Americans support a public option and yet it's been voted down every time in committee.  Who do these people in Congress think they work for?  Tough call, since we voted them in but the pharmaceuticals pay for it.

Also, what exactly is the problem with an individual mandate?? We tell insurance companies they have to cover us, but then don't mandate that people buy it?  What then, would stop me, a healthy 22-year old, from going about my life without health insurance-- using the emergency room if I need to-- and waiting until I get cancer to buy insurance?  That would make everyone's premiums go up.  How do people not get that?  Sometimes I think this country is doomed to fail because of bad logic.

Alright, that's all for now.  Yeah, I know, boring.  But hey, maybe you learned something.  And if you read the comments on other blog posts you can learn something about me.  Other than that I'm a political junkie.

Oh, and Amazon dropped the price of their Kindle.  Which makes me more financially able to swing such a purchase, and yet I still have mixed feelings about my role in the death of the printed word.  Hmm.

OH!  I saw Whip It and now I'm obsessed with being a roller derby girl (even though I'm missing it in the QC on Oct. 21st!).  What should my name be?  Help a girl out!!! (I used three exclamation points, so you know I'm serious.)

Related articles:

• Supreme Court To Hear Animal Sex Fetish Case; "Crush Videos," Dogfighting Footage May Be Treated Like Child Porn (huffingtonpost.com)
• Green Inc.: Chamber of Commerce Chief Is Defiant (greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com)

Okay, I have really been slacking on the updates. But really I am so happily confused with life right now that I don't feel like processing anything by writing about it.

To compromise, I'm posting a letter/rant I wrote to a friend a month or so ago (before I went to CA). I just thought about some of the things again recently, so I'm just going to plagiarize myself from July. I'm too lazy to correct the grammatical errors, by the way, so get over it. And it's long. But, you don't have to read it. No one's making you. :) Here goes:

"Well hello!!!

Remember that email I was supposed to finish and send a long time ago? Yeah, it's a little irrelevant now. But I just watched Schindler's List for the first time, and it reminded me of that movie you were telling us about in DC, something about pajamas and WWII?

Anyway, I was really taken aback by Schindler's List and I thought I would write a few words here. Because I feel like you'd understand. So first of all, who the HELL out there could possibly believe that the holocaust was a hoax?!? SERIOUSLY. And quite frankly, holocaust really doesn't do those actions justice, so I'm just going to call it genocide/massacre/murder from here on out. When I was watching a movie about the massacres during WWII, I started thinking about two things. The first being when they sing during the Sabbath. I started thinking about books I have read ("Night," for one) when they discuss how many Jews lost faith during the genocide. Not that I blame them. How could a God let something like that happen? Continuously, for such minute reasons? I'm not a religious person or anything, but I respect people skeptically have faith. And while I understand that life experiences affect whether or not someone believes in God (the kind of house they were raised in, religious people they came in contact with, etc.), I do believe that in the end, a person's relationship with God is between God and that person. So if God does exist-- and if s/he/they exist, what kind are they,really?-- it makes me really sad that human actions have turned the most faithful to the most resentful. It's not even that some don't believe in God, just that some refuse to pray to Him because they hate Him for what happened then. I find it completely understandable, don't get me wrong, but it makes me sad to think that the case. The human species sucks. Period. We can fuck anything up.

The second thing I was thinking revolves around the end of the movie. I started crying when (I'm assuming you've seen this movie?) Schindler cries at the end, saying he could have done more, he could have saved one more. One, it's sad that during the horrific depictions of treatment of the Jews, that I didn't cry, yet I did when Schindler did. I like to think that it's because I respond to emotions and not violence, but maybe part of it is that violence has become so "Hollywood" that emotions are the only thing I can connect to at this point. Shoot a man-- who cares? Cry about it-- okay, there's a chance-- but they'd better be a good actor. That is SAD. Anyway. When Schindler starts crying at the end, I have to wonder about how things haunt people. Particularly the feeling that we could have done more. Can we be doing more? Just because I'm not witnessing the atrocities firsthand, I KNOW they exist. What am I doing? Will this haunt me when I finally understand how MY inaction led to the demise of others? Or worse, will it never haunt me, when it should?

On a lighter (not really) but current note, I have to vent quickly about something I woke up to on the radio today. My parents are very conservative, and they blast conservative radio shows all over the house through our intercom (and oh yes, my mom LOVES the O'Reilly Factor). So. I woke up to some guy talking about slavery, saying "it's slavery" over and over. So I wondered to myself, "what is? Am I missing some knowledge of world events?" And do you know what he was talking about? The frickin' HEALTH CARE BILL that's in Congress right now. The healthcare bill that will add around a 1% tax to those making over $350,000. That's how they're going to pay for everyone to get healthcare. And this guy was calling it slavery, because that means that people are working for other people without receiving the money for it. "That's slavery, it's slavery," he said. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!? Are you seriously comparing a ONE PERCENT TAX INCREASE ON RICH PEOPLE to SLAVERY?!? He even said something about "that's what they did in the 18th century-- they brought them over on boats and made them work for someone else." THAT'S SLAVERY? Right, right. I am also a slave because I volunteer for Habitat for Humanity. Right? I mean, if that's ALL that slavery is (or, the most IMPORTANT part of slavery), I'm working for someone else and not getting paid. That makes me a slave. Wow. I had no idea my life was so hard. Or rather, what were those crazy slaves complainging about? ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!? It has nothing to do with suppression of rights, freedom, happiness, identity, respect. Nah, it's all about the MONEY. If we had paid them but still treated them like second-class citizens they wouldn't be slaves, and there would be no problem. Right? Because who cares about anything but money? UGH.

Okay. I think I'm done for now. I just thought of you, and decided I would subject you to my 3am ramblings. I hope you are doing well. Where are you? What are you up to? And what bothers you about the world/hollywood/humans/

yourself/republicans? You know I'm always available for a vent/sarcastic email. Hopefully I'll have something funny to write about soon. I'll let you know. As for me, I'm a graduate still working with replyforall (though barely, based on my hours) and can't find a job. Wahooo. And I'm being extremely lazy about it. But I'm having a summer filled with mountain biking, kayaking, whitewater rafting, and rock climbing. So that's definitely a highlight. :) Write back sooonnnn! (And, question from the first email I wrote you, what happened with the student at Colby? Did anything get resolved? Satisfactorily?)

Mish you. <3,>

When butterflies attack...

I've been laid up in bed basically for the last week, and I stopped taking happy pills yesterday (that's what I call my Oxycontin). Which apparently makes the happiness stop.

I just woke up-- quite forcibly-- from a dream I was having. I was in San Francisco (of course) with some of my friends and we had been walking along a city area to then settle down in a park. And there are butterflies in the park.

And they attacked me! In the dream, of course. But they attacked my face in the dream! What could that possibly mean, metaphorically?? Someone help me out... because now I have a certain uneasiness when it comes to butterflies.

...and the living is easy

Welp, here I am in CA. I actually haven't done that much exploring, but I've had a pretty good time so far. Tanner picked me up from the airport and we drove about 3 hours to Avery where his family has a mountain property. It was absolutely gorgeous. We spent a lot of time talking and drinking (a LOT of drinking) and cooking and hanging out by the lake(s). The last night we moved the mattresses outside and had a bottle of wine and talked and looked at the stars. There were so many of them! I am always amazed with that, and we looked for constellations (which, geez, are so much harder to find when you can see thousands of stars). It was a lot of fun.

And last night, I saw the Counting Crows for the first time in concert. Since I can probably match songs from them to most of my life (I mean, really, they've been around for a while), that was quite a treat. Of course, we get there, and SURPRISE! Backstage passes! I was very impressed, and Tanner-- whether he was trying to or not-- made my trip. He is going to make someone very, very happy one day.

So right now I'm in a cafe in Berkeley, where the guy gave me a free cup of coffee since I didn't have cash. The people who have made me feel incredibly welcome are the ones that I would least expect, and I could see myself living out here for a while. Six years may be a stretch, and the more I leave home, the more I see myself going back to the South.

That said, I kind of wish I wasn't out here for another week. I kind of wish I was going home today. I love spending time with Tanner (and his family is awesome), but I really wish I could transplant him to NC. All of my close friends are pretty spread out, and that makes me incredibly sad.

Oh, and those of you who remember my being weird about other possibilities for the trip, no worries there. It wasn't so much weird as it was "eh," and it kind of makes me wish I'd skipped out on that. If I had one expression, it would be to roll my eyes. I hope y'all can figure that out, because I don't really know what else to say.

And ROBYN. Still haven't seen her. Today I think I'm going to go to a bookstore, get a book, and go to one of the parks in San Francisco. It's amazing how not outgoing I am when I'm in a new place by myself. But there are a few things on my list that I really want to do, so hopefully I won't be too lazy. City Lights is on the list.

Right now I'm just going to throw caution to the wind and maybe meet up with a guy I met Saturday night who said he'd show me around the city. I don't remember him all that well, but maybe I need to meet someone random and have a new good experience.

That's about it for now. I haven't done anything too crazy, so I don't have any good stories. My bad. Now I really need to do replyforall. But that's your update, people. I'll try to be better in the future. Also, read the replyforall blog, please, because there's some interesting stuff I've been reading about, and I think that it would be easier to read it there than having me repost it on this site. Kthanxbye.

Off to Sunny San Fran

I really don't have much of an update other than the one I just wrote. I survived my backpacking trip, and I went mountain biking (don't ask me about it, I won't stop laughing), and flat-water kayaking. Now I kind of don't feel like going to California because I just want to be at home and go whitewater rafting, and kayaking, and rock climbing as much as I want. Screw SF.

No, I really just hate change. I mean, I love change and new things, but not at first. Then I'm going to get comfortable in California and decide I'm going to live there instead of coming home. But maybe not. Maybe I'll have an awful time. Especially if my last post is true.

This is kind of sweet. Whenever I feel like keeping things a secret (except from maybe my friends who can read that) I'll just post like before.

I've decided. I want someone or something to knock me off my feet. Otherwise, it's a waste of time.