Random interactions

Every now and then, I have a string of what seem to be odd or funny fleeting interactions with strangers. I always wonder if these people are a kind of messenger delivering something to me that I wouldn't hear coming from a friend. Then again, I try not to read too much into them.

I was taking a cab to the wedding in Georgia. It was only a dozen blocks or so but I had some slight heels on and I’m such a wimp, I’d probably have blisters if I walked it. Anyway, the cab driver was chatting at me the whole time but a lot of it was unintelligible for some reason. I think I told him I was going to a wedding, he asked where I was from, I said San Francisco and then he said he’d spent some time there in the sixties. Oh, I said, that was a good time to be there. He looked at me, really confused, huh? Never mind. He chatted at me some more. Then when I got out (and he dropped me off in the wrong place as it turns out) he said “And just remember, it’s never too late!”

I was introduced to someone at a party on Friday and he said as he was leaving, “Your name is an adjective!”

The other day I had to mail some bills. I had been sitting at the computer for far too long and finally launched myself out the door when I had only 20 minutes to get there. I could make it if I walked quickly but when I hit the hills, I suddenly got a burst of energy and decided to run. There was one big hill, a street, and then another. Halfway up the first one, a guy on a bike came by. He said something and I paused the iPod (which I never take walking but did because I knew I needed motivation to get there quickly). I said, very impressive! He rode his bike exactly alongside me to the next street. Let’s see how you do on this one, he said. Challenged, I of course had to keep running. My chest pounded a bit on the top but I made it up at the same pace as him. As he pedaled off he said, “You have my admiration!”

While I was England, I went into a shop to get some photos printed. The saleslady asked me if I was Canadian. When I said no, American, she said “Really? Because your accent is so soft.”

In Georgia, I was at the apartment of my friend getting married. All the bridesmaids were arriving for hair and makeup and to generally get ready together. There were a lot of people milling around as my friend got her hair put into giant curlers. I introduced myself to a woman I didn’t know. You have good eyebrows, she said. I realized she must have been the makeup gal and said that I wasn’t getting made up. Embarrassed, she said “Oh, well it’s good you have nice eyebrows then, imagine if you didn’t!”

I miss you

Hello sweet people. I know I said I'd stop making myself feel guilty but it must be part of my DNA. Each day I don't post I feel like I'm letting you (me?) down. The fact is I don't want to keep subjecting you to the mass confusion that is my brain at the moment. I also am reevaluating my "we're all going to die" stance on the world at the moment. Even when I was in England, though, at a drunken BBQ the conversation turned to the appalling state of the world. Factory farming, real estate prices, health care, the environment, immigration, over population and the eventual demise of America all popped up. It seems to me that people in general are more likely to have a dim view of the future than we used to but at the same time, I think, maybe it's my age and the age of people around me? I don't remember noticing or caring about most of this stuff as a young person. How do I know which it is? Someone told me, things are never as bad as the media says they are, but does that mean they aren't bad? Or that we should focus on the positive?


I did a yoga class last night for the first time in a really long time (super sore today), and the teacher was talking about how light/dark, yes/no and male/female are two sides that need to be equally developed. Just like a bird needs two wings to fly, we need these two things. I immediately had this image of a bird with one wing flying around in a circle. That's what happens when one of the wings is bigger or stronger than the other, we spin in circles no matter how hard we flap. That's what's happening to me now I think. I'm in a loop of negative feedback - no, can't and aren't worthy - one that I think was started a long time ago. Why is it bubbling up now? This is really old, dark stuff that I guess I never really purged, it just lay dormant for so long that I thought it went away. Ha ha. Stuff doesn't just go away though, does it? You have to take out the trash, it doesn't take itself out.

So I have a pre-interview for a Director of Marketing job tomorrow. It's the level of position I've been looking for but not really being considered for. I'm going to take my advice and prepare and hope that the garbage doesn't come up this time. I've been looking up interview questions and writing up the answers, practicing some of the more personal ones out loud and even though it's at 9am, I'm going to make time to meditate and get centered. Meditation, by the way is one of those things, like exercise, that I go to bed every night promising I'll start doing tomorrow. Why is that so difficult? Sitting still for a few minutes? And I'll buy some interview clothes tomorrow in preparation for an in-person interview. But the job aside, there's some other forces at work right now challenging me on a daily basis to answer the question "what do you want?" and so far I have a million ideas but no answers. I have a feeling this is where meditation would help. And because I have no answers, I am inert. Not knowing which direction to go, I go nowhere, I do nothing. There are dishes sitting in my sink for days on end now. When I had a job, I washed them every day.

When I feel like this, it makes me feel very lonely. Not lonely for other people's company, but missing my own company. Missing the person that I remember being, that other people tell me I am, that I know I must still be. Where is she and how long will she be away? I try not to entertain thoughts of self-hatred but I'm not liking myself right now to a really critical degree. It's not something new or foreign, though, self-criticism is always there. It's just that one wing has grown very strong lately and I'm flying in circles. I just remembered something. For the last week or so there's been a very large bumble bee flying in the space between my building and the one next door, the view from my desk. It's there every day buzzing around at my height and every day he bangs into my window as if he's trying to fly right into me. Maybe it's a metaphor for how I feel.

The new issue of National Geographic is all about China. I'll wrote another post about that because I have some thoughts to share, but one of the things that struck me is that as their economy grows, as they move from socialism into capitalism, the middle-class is finding themselves in a constant state of panic. They fear that if they don't keep moving, keep improving their lives, keep pushing their children, keep making more money, they will "become obsolete and be eliminated." Lord, that's some pretty harsh language. Eliminated? At the same time, religion is growing like wild fire in China. Religious leaders in China say rampant materialism leaves the soul empty and people are seeking to fill it. It's so interesting to see this happening in real time to a country, reaching the state that so many of us in the Western world have been in for a long time. It will be different, I think, for the Chinese because they have so much more history and common tradition. Will they abandon it completely for this new life? Or will they come back to it? Or will they find the balance and meaning and teach us all how to find it?

An observer

I'm back! I haven't posted in three weeks because I was in the UK for ten days then drove back to SF from LA and then immediately flew out to Georgia for a wedding. It took me four days back home to get caught up on things, sort through my photos and stop feeling like the walking dead. I didn't get that job, the one I talked myself out of so I'm continuing to apply. There are some really kick-ass positions out there but I really have to sell myself to get them, my resume won't do it for me. Until I can chuck it all and live on a farm, I need to prepare a pitch.

I never made a New Year's resolution and now I realize it should be to stop beating myself up because I don't think I'll ever stop doing stupid things. After reading about Barack's "verbal snafus", watching Robert Evan's big mistake in The Kid Stays In The Picture that he's never been forgiven for, and in the documentary Man From Plains seeing Jimmy Carter take heat for his educated and humble opinion, at least I know that I am not alone.

The mistake? I went to the wedding of one my best girlfriends last weekend and AGAIN made the heinous mistake of not getting my photo taken with the bride. Last October, the first of my close girlfriends got married. There are less than ten women for whom I would fly cross-country to watch get married and now two of them have married and I never got that photo. Never mind that I hardly have any photos of us together anyway, I don't have a photo of myself in the nice dress I wore or a photo of them looking more gorgeous than ever. Sigh!

I did manage, however, to take almost 90 photos that I considered Flickr worthy, in less than 48 hours. But posting my photos online, I also realized that I didn't capture any of the really good stuff that happened that weekend. I just got a new point and shoot but more and more, I think I need an SLR with a great zoom lens. For me, photography is not about the technical beauty, it's about the subject. It's right in line with my obsession for truth. I don't want to see some glossed up beauty shot, I want to see a moment of truth, something that happens so fast in real life you don't get to study it. That's what I love about photography, capturing a moment that will never happen again. But with a point and shoot, you have to be so close to get a good shot that people get self-conscious or hide and the moment is destroyed.

This might sound crazy but I'm really thinking about being a photographer, or a journalist of some sort. Is that possible? It really appeals to me. I'm already an observer; in many instances I prefer observation to participation. It's a completely different viewpoint, I realize, but it's one that enjoy. In fact, and this is really silly, I'm starting to think about being a documentary filmmaker. I distinctly remember having a conversation with a friend of mine who was trying to say that maybe my blog could be done in film format. I said that I wasn't interested in documentary, only narrative (fictional or based on truth) because I enjoy them more and some other dumb thing about not wanting to create to the medium (the Internet). But documentaries actually speak to many of my interests: Human behavior, truth and social issues. I love capturing something real, telling a story, and making a comment on what's going on in the world. I mean, why not photojournalism? Why not documentaries?

The short I made for the Bicycle Film Festival was accepted and screens this month in New York - it actually is a documentary of sorts - and I'm editing a short documentary for an organization that helps under served teens go to college. Wait a minute, I already AM a documentary filmmaker!

Vomiting jibberish (and then I'm done)

I was on my way to a friend's birthday party when I remembered to call another friend in L.A. whose birthday was also on that day. He asked about the job and I told him I got creamed in the interview. "Oh RAD" he replied, "I love it when that happens. That and getting dumped are the best. I always have great growth after those experiences." It made me laugh, what a perversely positive attitude! As I've been thinking about it, there is an enormous amount for me to learn from this.

That night I had the most agonizing sleep. It's difficult to describe but in my quasi sleep-dream state, I was reliving the interview and labeling each thing that came out of my mouth as inappropriate, inappropriately bizarre and incoherent. I could feel bile being created in my gut by my anguished state and resisted the urge at 3am to write a blog, call a friend or otherwise cry out for help. Instead I just kept my eyes shut and told myself to sleep. I am too prideful and don't like to feel I've made a fool of myself, especially when I had an opportunity to impress. Two of my close girlfriends were interviewing for jobs they really wanted at the same time - one of them just got the job and is overjoyed - and both gave presentations made to dazzle.

I've learned that I'm pretty good at winging it and if I'm feeling particularly sharp, I can be amazing. But if I'm off my game and get nervous, it all goes to hell. My friend who just got the job said "we're at an age where we expected to have done some things, and not just talk about it but actually do it." Good point! Why, I wonder, didn't I come up with a presentation. I had notes, sure, and threw little ideas out here and there but why not a concept to present? At the very least, it shows I really want the job, even if it's totally off.

Things I will immediately do to step up my game:
1) Buy an interviewing outfit. Something I'm comfortable in that makes me feel good.
2) Practice my answers to questions I can anticipate with a friend. Practice some more.
3) Prepare a presentation. My story, my experiences, what I'm looking for, what I can offer.

Then, for each company, I'll as best as I can, prepare a proposal with ideas for the job. This one should have been easy. I'd already met with my to-be boss and a partner in the company, impressed her and should have just met the requirements of my peers. Instead, I came unprepared, relying on my charm on enthusiasm and fell on my face.

I asked a friend who teaches self-compassion workshops how people can accept enough blame to learn from mistakes but still forgive themselves. He said, "I tell myself that I did the best I could at the time with the information I had." I thought that was really fabulous. Hindsight is 20/20. Forgive but learn so that next time I'll have more information.

You write like a man

My friend Paul posted this cool test (uh, several years ago) that I always meant to take but I suppose didn’t have the writing to. Basically it counts the number of times certain male/female indicator words are used in a piece of writing and determines the gender of the author. I decided to run the test on ten recent posts that have enough words. Here are the results:

“Fun sucking technology”, what to me seems like a totally female rant, comes out male.
Female Score: 1035
Male Score: 1114

So does “More protests” please!
Female Score: 1208
Male Score: 1245

“Uncivilized” squeaks out as female because guess what? “Not” is a female word!
Female Score: 1654
Male Score: 1653

But one about being scared? Male!
Female Score: 1027
Male Score: 1180

“Landing on my feet” is female too, and “was” is a female word. What are they trying to say?! That women are negative and talk about the past?
Female Score: 701
Male Score: 690

“A post I started in December” turns out female thanks to the word “and.” I guess we’re inclusive also.
Female Score: 937
Male Score: 906

"How to be on camera", my “how to” post, is overwhelmingly male thanks to heavy use of the word “are.”
Female Score: 1367
Male Score: 1480

Even though I use the word “with” (another inclusive female word) more times than any other in “Addendums to earlier posts,” it comes out male due to a consistent use of the male words “more,” “the,” “is,” and “a.”
Female Score: 1341
Male Score: 1588

Finally, “Dying to get here,” comes out male. My use of the male word “what” gives “with” a serious run for her money but still doesn’t catch up.
Female Score: 2553
Male Score: 3378


6 of 10 tests think I’m a man. Maybe I’m just “balanced.” BTW, I'm on vacation until May 5 and will hopefully have a slew of new posts. See you then!

I really should be a scientist

I keep coming to that conclusion. I know that in reality, scientists also have a hard time proving their worth, getting anyone to believe their ideas, and probably, also, have to answer questions like "what kind of team player are you?" Is this multiple choice? How many kinds are there? I don't know what it is but every question in an interview sounds like a veiled insult. "So you aren't working...what are you doing?" I'm looking for a fucking job! What do you think I'm doing? Well actually, I'm going on vacation to England (which they already know), I'm working on a documentary short for a non-profit (which is on my resume) and I'm blogging for WhatGives.com (which is what I actually said). The disinterested 25-year old with black hair hanging in his eyes made a note. I found out later that he's the quasi-blogger for the company. Sigh, why is this so nerve wracking?

If you read my previous post, you know I'm afflicted with massive regret syndrome which makes me agonize for hours, sometimes days after such an encounter, over every hideous answer, comment "that may be construed as negative" (which, I believe is literally everything) and the worse, over sharing. It is not always a good thing to be loquacious and at ease in front of an audience. I also should be clever enough to know that I could have prepared for this. Halfway through the interview, I was wishing I was a scientist and I could talk about data and research and things I'm building or testing or theorizing. I wish they'd give me a test or a "what would you do in this scenario?" Instead, they want to know about ME. What kind of person? What kind of worker? What kind of team member? What kind of interviewee? Did I tell you I was being group interviewed? Fun!

I wish I could say I felt good before, during or after my third interview for this job with the cool company, but I didn't. I looked really weird. My hair was flat, my face puffy, my skin red. What the heck? I never like what I'm wearing and always pretty sure it's all wrong. The last two days, I've been nervous and shredded my poor thumbnails so I was conscious of trying to hide those. And then the most senior woman in the room asked me when I graduated college, a date I intentionally left off my resume so as not to reveal my age. When I replied 1995 (and the others had also been asking about dates), I said "now you're all figuring out how old I am." Oh no, she said, we're not allowed to ask that.

I never knew how impossible it is to speak about myself without sounding like a total jackass. Really. Impossible! I feel like a used car salesman. My problem is, to combat the awkwardness, I'll show the customer the rust on the bottom, just so they know I'm on the level. Interviewing feels so messy to me, so out of control. It's like that scene in Parenthood where Steve Martin does the routine about slipping on Cowboy Dan's guts. That's me, except I'm slipping on my own guts. Oh well, it's over now and there's nothing I can do about it now except prepare for the next one and hope there is a next one.

Shame on me

I was out the other night with some friends of my good friend here in the city. They were all serious web geeks, information architects and visual designers, from the biggest dot coms in the area: Yahoo!, Flickr, Digg and Google. One guy said he’d met another one through their blogs ten years ago. (I asked to make sure, "you had a blog in 1998?!") There wasn’t cell phone reception outside the bar and they were all cringing, “My SMS isn’t working!” “I can’t Twitter!” One guy even remarked that he needed to find more offline interests and activities. Much of the conversations tended towards new Google applications, LOL cats and other blogs and websites.

It was during one of these conversations that I learned that it’s not considered kosher in the blogosphere to change your entries once they’re posted. I was saying that some of my readers subscribe by email and often I change it several times after the initial post, usually just to fix typos, change words when I realize I’ve used the same one three times in a row, or clarify confusing bits. I need to see it in formatting and read it several times to catch some of those things but the people getting it by email are getting a different version than what ends up on the site. Once or twice, though, I’ve modified the actual content, even changed my opinion, after getting comments from a reader. This apparently, is really frowned upon. There are actually people who compare side-by-side versions and call bloggers out on their undisclosed changes (I always wondered what those strikethroughs were all about, oops!)

I talked to one of the Flickr guys about all the photos on Flickr that are so stylized with in camera or post effects, available in the digital world. If you look up San Francisco, I said, you get a slew of gorgeous artistic photos that don’t actually look like San Francisco. It didn't bother him. He shrugged, said something about "reality" and started looking for a new conversation. Here I am arguing that I want more reality in people’s photos and he’s telling me that it’s important to maintain the “original” integrity of my blog posts. Maybe it’s because I don’t have that many readers that I assume no one would ever notice or care if I keep finessing my posts but I suppose most people consider a blog to be a conversation rather than a collection of essays. It would be like going back and changing your side of a conversation, something I would love to be able to do.

Here's my confession: I feel ashamed and embarrassed and regret 75-90% of what I say after spending time with people I don't know. (The percentage is much lower with friends, maybe 40-60%). This is not only one of my biggest problems but is also what I worry about most when writing the blog: that I can’t change my opinion, I might misspeak or someone might not like what I’ve said. Maybe the blog is here to teach me to express myself without regret. As much as I think the “rules” are a bit ridiculous, it just might be in my best interest to follow them.

I recently started blogging for a site other than my own, What Gives?!, and I've realized that those entries are just not as personal and provocative, so I have no feelings of regret about what I've written. It is helping to illuminate what exactly it is that am shameful about: my opinion and my experiences. Ugh, well, at least blogging isn't killing me.

Until the violence stops

I just watched one of my Netflix recommendations, V-Day: Until The Violence Stops, a documentary about the movement born out of Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues; a worldwide movement of women reclaiming their bodies, their dignity and their power. I can’t believe, as an actress and a feminist, that I’ve never seen it. From former comfort women in the Philippines – teenage girls who were forced to “service” six to eight Japanese soldiers a day for more than two years during WWII – to Africa where a single woman started a revolution against female circumcision, the movie reminded me of just how powerful words can be.

I recently debated with a young documentary filmmaker about the power of images versus words. While I think one of the most powerful films ever made, Baraka, is a purely visual film, words are what change the world: the law, the constitution, marriage vows, prayer and the words “I love you,” which never lose their power. It takes a native man in North Dakota, during one of the local productions of The Vagina Monologues, a full three minutes to stop his face quivering enough to thank the audience for coming and honoring the native women killed by their husbands in domestic violence. It is so painful to watch the suffering endured by men and women, abuser and abused, in this cycle of violence. This particular man abused his wife for the first three years of marriage until (and this is implied) he killed his two-year old son who was trying to protect his mother from his father.

The last two men that I’ve dated told me that their last serious girlfriends had been sexually abused or raped, and at some point the dysfunction became an issue in their relationship. I’ve heard this story so many times, in fact, that I wonder why men don’t realize that most women they know have been abused, raped or at least sexually harassed at work or school. After the primaries, I told a good friend of mine that I felt guilty supporting Barack instead of Hilary. I can’t help but think that only a female in charge will bring attention to the violence against women the world over. There is, of course, no guarantee that Hilary would do any more in that regard than a man, but the fact that one half of the population is still so routinely victimized by the other half, across cultures, religious and socioeconomic backgrounds, and I’m sorry to say, in ways that are insidiously considered “normal,” is unacceptable.

Ironically, I was watching this film on the 10-year anniversary of V-Day and there were a slew of performances and celebrations last month, some are still going on. The monologues are the best way to see what it’s all about but if you can’t see a performance, or organize one yourself, you could always get the DVD. I would like to think that men can watch this and be just as moved, and not think "it's a women's issue." This is a worldwide problem that affects all of us, and we all can do something to stop it.

Fun sucking, time wasting, age discriminating technology

I am seriously about to shoot my computer. Is it just me or is anyone else having trouble with Gmail? I swear I have to quit it constantly, try it in another browser, it just doesn’t load or when I click an email it “refreshes” but nothing happens. My browser gives up. I force quit. After I while I get a message that the program has stopped responding, do I want to force quit? YES! Damn it, I just told it to do that. Grrr. I restart. I try it again, after five minutes of trying, I am finally able to login again. There are seven new emails since I last had access an hour ago.

I’ve been at the computer for three hours already. First I discovered that my move of my iTunes music from my computer to an external hard drive didn’t quite work. It was loading an old library. I replace it with the new library. Now the old songs aren't in it. I recopy the songs, now I have 4,000 duplicates. OMG. It can’t find the original songs now, just the new ones. WTF? I have to delete the duplicates but oops, my favorites are not marked on the new imports. I have to manually mark them first.

I get that done but now I have to rebuild my set lists. That was relatively painless and I finally update the iPod for my impending trip to the UK. I still haven’t figured out how I’m going to recharge the thing after my 11 hour flight…can I plug it into someone else computer and charge? After that, I upload the photos from yesterday’s brunch. I tweak color. I export. I upload to Flickr. I rename, I tag, and I organize. This is about the time my browsers want to poop out. I have about 12 tabs open of links I want to include in blog posts. I copy the links into a Word document. Oh lord, I think Word is about to give up too. I’m just going to restart.

It’s a good thing I’m unemployed. Otherwise, how would I possibly have time for all this technology? Then it occurs to me that half of my workday must have been spent wrangling with technology. Skpying with friends and coworkers, usually about nothing, reading and responding to emails, setting up my Pandora stations, and trouble shooting performance problems. But I was getting paid!

Since Saturday, I’ve written three blog posts in my notebook but they haven’t shown up on my blog yet because of the pain of sitting down and wrangling with technology to get them done. I can’t think with all this wrestling going on. Last week I spent several joyous hours shuffling video files and music from various hard drives to make room for a new video project. Technology has the maddening dual effect of making things much more accessible while also sucking the fun out of them: for me, filmmaking, writing and marketing.

There’s nary a profession these days that isn’t affected by the technology fun sucking phenomenon. My dad became an engineer because he wanted to build things but found himself instead, 20 years later, a programmer who hadn’t built anything. That’s when he quit and starting building houses. He draws the designs on the computer but it’s still a world barely touched by technology. Hairdressers are one of the rare few professions that haven’t changed. People will always have hair and it will always need cut. It’s pretty basic.

But even worse than fun sucking is the experience invalidation. A woman told me in an interview that she’d rather hire a person with two years experience with widgets than a person with ten years marketing experience (me). Seriously? I think it’s probably always been like this but I’ve always been on the receiving end of that short sighted discrimination; the belief that young people are naturally more able to understand what’s going on in the world. I can’t think of anything more preposterous. I suppose the same people who ten years ago thought the person with the most experience was the most knowledgeable are the same ones that think a 24-year old with two years experience is the most hip.

Here's the truth, there are people who are naturally curious, clever and are always changing. It doesn’t matter how old they are or how much experience they have, they are the ones who will do the job well.

More protests please!

Last week, I was chatting with a friend about going to watch the Olympic Torch relay here in San Francisco. Following the protests in London and Paris, there were rumors of a similar reception here. I didn’t go, ultimately, because of the confusion over the route and because wasn’t sure what to make of the protests. While Skyping with a friend in Europe about it, he said “throw a stone for me.” Throw a stone? At whom? One of the runners? I can support boycotts. I know I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again, I remember when we boycotted “Made in China” products and I don’t really recall what kind of human rights improvements China made to get off that list but I didn’t hear anyone complaining at the register of Target or heard anyone pressuring their favorite designers even though they’ve all set up shop in China or another country with much worse treatment of workers – and charging the same ridiculous prices.

I can support peaceful protest. After all, that’s what the Dalai Lama always preaches. We all know the torch relay is a huge media event and I fully support Free Tibet and Amnesty International using the coverage as a way to get their message seen and heard. But what I can’t understand is why the thing needs to be stopped: flame snuffed, athletes mobbed, bus blocked. Again, it’s not that I don’t support the causes; it’s just that the reason isn’t clear and as always I think from a marketing perspective, it doesn’t win you friends. Less informed Americans will just be baffled and defensive, even if they pay more attention it’s now going through a filter of confusion. “Why do Tibetans hate the Olympics?” someone is bound to think. But actually, I worry more about the Chinese. We have to separate the Chinese government from the Chinese people just as we would expect others to do of us here in the U.S. The Chinese are very excited and proud to host the Olympics.

In San Francisco, a false relay route was published so no one could disrupt, or even witness the relay. What the heck? Isn’t the whole POINT is to support international solidarity and unity? Perusing photos on Flickr, it seems that only various protesters showed and the only thing they saw was each other. BBC news published several “man on the street” interviews with people in China to get their reaction. Their reactions are actually very balanced – “yes, we have problems but many people are misinformed about China and should take this opportunity for increased dialogue not shutting us out.” Hear, hear! They very aptly ask, what about the U.S. human rights violations? I have to raise my eyebrows at that and think, yeah, what about Guatanamo, Iraq, 1 in 35 adult black men in prison, the death penalty, depriving people of medical care, homicide, Native Americans, homelessness? We may not be beating monks or imprisoning writers but we’re certainly not perfect.

Yes, we should express ourselves. Yes, we should take a stand. Yes, we should protest and boycott whatever we don’t agree with. And yes, we should pay more attention to China but we should not feel that we are superior and we should consider the best way to being a dialogue with the people of China. Each and every one of us purchases items from China on a regular basis, so we always have the option to make a statement through boycott. It’s just not as sexy as laying down in front of a bus on national television.

In a couple of weeks, a defense contractor hired by the federal government, using funds from Homeland Security (read the Huff Post article!), is going to begin spraying the Bay Area to eradicate a harmless moth. This campaign is scheduled to continue for years despite protests from our representatives, expert etymologists, farmers and citizens, and despite the fact that the chemical being sprayed is not necessary and unsafe. Do you think any of the protesters from the torch relay will show up at City Hall on April 28 for the peaceful protest? No, I don’t think we should protest less, I think we should protest more.