how to be merry

The assumption under the advertising and the money that flows around this season is: consume more and you will be merrier!

But we should all know better than to believe advertisers...

some alternative suggestions from the economists:

What sumptuary advice do they offer? In general, the economic arbiters of taste recommend “experiences” over commodities, pastimes over knick-knacks, doing over having. Mr Frank thinks people should work shorter hours and commute shorter distances, even if that means living in smaller houses with cheaper grills. The appeal of such fripperies palls faster than people expect, they say. David Hume suggested that “the amusements, which are the most durable, have all a mixture of application and attention in them; such as gaming and hunting.”

That, it turns out, is not easy. Happiness, as measured by national surveys, has hardly changed over 50 years. The rich are generally happier than the poor, but rich countries do not get happier as they get richer. The Japanese are much better off now than in 1950, but the proportion who say they are “very happy” has not budged. Americans too have remained much as Alexis de Tocqueville found them in the 19th century: “So many lucky men, restless in the midst of abundance.”

~ from Happiness and economics: Economics discovers its feelings

a few thoughts from scripture:

Better one handful with tranquility than two handfuls with toil and chasing after the wind.

~ excerpt from Ecclesiastes 4

Whoever loves money never has money enough;
whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with his income.
This too is meaningless.

As goods increase,
so do those who consume them.
And what benefit are they to the owner
except to feast his eyes on them?

The sleep of a laborer is sweet,
whether he eats little or much,
but the abundance of a rich man
permits him no sleep.

I have seen a grievous evil under the sun:
wealth hoarded to the harm of its owner,

or wealth lost through some misfortune,
so that when he has a son
there is nothing left for him.

Naked a man comes from his mother's womb,
and as he comes, so he departs.
He takes nothing from his labor
that he can carry in his hand.

~ excerpt from Ecclesiastes 5

complications of choice

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

I just stumbled upon this from my friend Angela's blog and the thought that popped into my mind was 'democracy'. Especially the part about "We do not know what we want", because perhaps, we don't know what's good for us.

race to the top [2]

race in the academy

Just some interesting excerpts from two articles I stumbled across last week…. I don’t really have any particular responses to them right now, other than I do agree that they pose interesting questions that can’t be answered easily:

Is race just a scapegoat for the problems of society when we should actually be looking at class? Is race an excuse for us to not talk about economic inequality? Would it ever be possible to extricate class from race, as history has inexorably intertwined the two? And how does the ‘framing of the question’, the vocabulary of interpretation, the lens of analysis, or whatever you want to call it, alter our conclusions? [And perhaps also, if you could really eradicate identity politics, or racial understandings of society and history, what would that solve? By erasing race from our discourse, and insisting on avoiding it altogether, do we deny something valuable about ourselves?]

This first article in the Chronicle addresses Princeton’s new African-American studies department and discusses race in higher education:

My point, then, is that the commitment to African-American studies, like the commitment to Asian-American studies, is a commitment to describing our social problems in a way that will make all of us — teachers as well as students, alumni as well as parents — feel comfortable. It does this by racializing injustice at a moment when race is less relevant to injustice — at least to the injustice done by elite universities — in America than it has ever been. Rooks quotes Orlando Patterson as saying, "The doors are wide open for ... black middle-class kids to enter elite colleges." The relevant term here is "middle-class." African-American- and Asian-American-studies programs tell us that, from the standpoint of social justice, the crucial thing about us is our identity, at the very moment when, again from the standpoint of social justice, the crucial thing about us is our wealth and what the upper middle class sees on that television show is not the image of its own virtue (that's what make us comfortable), but the reverse face of its own success.

Another reason is that these programs are the places where questions about the meaning of race (and its handmaiden, culture) get raised. No assertion is more common in American intellectual life today than the insistence that race and class (and gender) are inextricably intertwined, and, in a certain sense, this is obviously true. Everybody has a household income; everybody's descended from somebody; everybody's male or female or some combination of the two. But one of the things that thinking seriously about race makes possible is not just the imbrication of race with class, but the disarticulation of class from race. We live in a society where the struggle to achieve racial equality is not the most profound of the challenges that face us. A program in African-American studies that helps us to understand not just the importance of race but its limits (not just its relevance but its irrelevance) will be well worth the money Princeton plans to spend.

This article in The Nation reviews the books The Trouble with Diversity:

The Trouble With Diversity is a bracing jeremiad, an all-out assault on the way identity in general, and race in particular, is used to organize society. It is also a thought experiment in which Michaels invites us to remove our race-tinted glasses and view the world in the class-based terms that, he argues, actually define it. For Michaels, there is no middle ground, no room for compromise: Race shoved class out of American consciousness, and he wants to reverse the situation. "We love race--we love identity--because we don't love class," he writes. The alternative is not to "love" class, since Michaels knows that class, unlike race, is distinctly unlovable. Class inspires no "National Museum of Lower-Income Americans on the Mall" in Washington, and no special holidays celebrating the culture of the poor (indeed, the "culture of poverty" is a sociological epithet); while some poor people inherit their poverty, we would all agree with Michaels that it would be perverse to think of it as their "heritage." The only area in which we are sentimental about poverty is in studies of working-class culture and literature, in which class is considered a form of identity.

Furthermore, Michaels accused contemporary champions of postidentity theory--those who envisage identity as contingent, performative and fluid--of employing the very racial essentialism they oppose. The more we emphasize culture and diversity, he scolded, the more we become mired in race. We inevitably answer the question "What should we do?" in terms of "who we are"--an appeal to racial/ethnic identity. The quest for identity is a vicious circle in which one can never escape the nineteenth-century notion of race. "For racial identity to become a project, it must turn to culture; for cultural identity to become a project, it must turn to race," he wrote.

i'm so proud of my brother

Despite the fact that I have to spend all of tonight editing my brother's college essays, I'd just like to say that I'm super proud of him.

He recently made a Nintendo Wii joystick that is selling on Ebay currently for $86 bucks, check it out :)

His blog is Project Wonderland.

ME (consultant bio)

For my job, I recently had to write a biography of myself in order to help give more information about myself for project staffing. This was the end result*:

L. Lu graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Pennsylvania in 2006. She was part of the Huntsman Program for International Studies and Business. L. studied Spanish and spent a semester abroad in Buenos Aires. [In addition to avid traveling, she volunteered with a church located in the slums, and conducted independent research on poverty demographics.]**

L. was involved with a variety of groups throughout college, including Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, and Propaganda Silk (a literary magazine). After her junior year, L. interned with ABC Company. She then spent two weeks in Honduras, teaching Excel and Word classes in Spanish and helping reorganize a bookstore’s inventory systems. Upon graduation, L. spent six weeks living in a lower-income neighborhood in North Philadelphia, volunteering at a homeless shelter for women and children.

In her free time, L. enjoys reading, watching movies, and writing. She is also beginning to dabble into photography and knitting.

I was quite disgusted with the result. Despite the fact that all the information in it was true, the impression that it gives bears no resemblance whatsoever to myself. As my beloved NT boyfriend would put it:

The bio makes it sound like you're an experience junkie who can't possibly be a whole person, and who is riddled with affluence-guilt and trying to compensate for it, while simultaneously feeding the experience-idolatry with a continual fodder of the exotic Other.

What disappoints me most about this bio is that it says nothing about my motivations and values. It makes it seem as though I care about poverty as some sort of ‘cool identity’. As though I did the things I chose to do because it would make me more ‘interesting’. Though I do confess that I have brought up these things in conversation in hopes of making myself slightly more interesting and more appealing to talk to, I don’t think that was ever the motive for doing those things.

But if you take the bare bone events of my life, and fail to apply the appropriate framework to interpret them, I do become a farce, an empty shell of a person…

Once again, have I been betrayed by words?
(Or rather, are words more powerful than we think they are?)***

*My name is initialed, because I’m really paranoid about having my full name online even though it's out there in the comments section. Same goes for the company I work for… That’s what Facebook is for, not my blog.
**That sentence was cut out of the final version I submitted. It was a little too disgusting for me.
***This line should be revised. Please read comments to this post.

consultant life

in between spaces

profiting from the non-profit

I confess to having an occasional (well, perhaps frequent, but often repressed) affinity for fashion magazines (e.g. Vogue, In Style, Lucky etc…), and am momentarily allured by the pages of fashion and glamour -- the illusion, that perhaps if I bought the right clothes, and wore the right make up, I might actually look socially adept.*

In recently looking at the “Improper Bostonian”, a humor/fashion/rich people magazine that proliferates on the doorstep of my far-too-expensive corporate apartment that I do not pay for, I was glancing through an article on the “10 with style: Meet 10 stylish Bostonians”.

For one profile, the reporter writes “The wife and collaborator of best-selling mystery writer Robert B. Parker is a supporter of numerous charitable causes and always appears looking smashing at fundraisers, receptions and opening nights.”

This little snippet reveals the culture surrounding philanthropy—social status, fashion, and the purchase of morality. Sometimes, it seems that there is much less concern about the actual charities (and the various challenges and problems associated with the causes they are supporting), than about the people who are giving and what they’re wearing.

This seems to further confirm conversations I’ve had with people who currently work or have worked in philanthropy and non-profits. Donors are often insistent on the importance of having their names recognized according to the amount of money they’ve donated. Non-profits often are forced to function as corporations, with donors as their customers. The products they offer are social status, moral righteousness and personal acclaim. As a result, so many well intentioned non-profits are forced to spend time and energy on pleasing their donors than focusing on their actual causes.

[By no means am I saying that it is bad that money is given towards various good causes (nor am I implying that every philanthropist is like this), but it’s sad to see generosity tainted by the pursuit of status and personal glory. Since when did your clothes matter more than the organization that you’re giving to? It makes it seem as though the only part of ‘anthropy’ being loved in philanthropy is oneself. And it makes me wonder if philanthropists ever really experience the rewards of humble and anonymous giving.]

* I usually stop reading once I realize that first of all, they’re rather high school and every issue says the exact same thing; and that second of all, the more I read them, the less content I am with what I have and who I am.

l'enfer, c'est nous (hell is us)

unbearable lightness / burdensome weight

an interesting observation from Zach's blog:

I think it's a very sad fact of the human condition that we cannot conceptualize a state of being in which we would enjoy living forever. Our existence is fundamentally flawed - paradoxically, we are terrified of both death and eternal life.

... which in my mind touches upon some points made in C.S. Lewis passages (and the thesis of his book The Great Divorce):

"Christianity asserts we are all going to on forever, and this must either be true or false. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I am going to live for ever. Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy are gradually getting worse so gradually that the increase in my lifetime will not be very noticeable- but it might be absolute hell in a million years- in fact, if Christianity is true, hell is the precisely correct technical term for it... Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, alwyas blaming others... but you are still distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it. But there may come a day when you can no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood or even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself, going on forever like a machine. It is not a question of God 'sending us' to hell. In each of us, there is something growing, which will BE Hell unless it is nipped in the bud."

"Earth, I think, will not be found by anyone to be in the end a very distinct place. I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell: and earth, if put seecond to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself."

Perhaps Jean Paul Sartre is in part right: "L'enfer, c'est les autres" (Hell is other people). Except that, hell isn't just other people- it is us.*

*Or perhaps, more correctly, it is in us.

people you meet

After my flight today, I ended up sharing a cab with this other woman, Lorna Sass. Is she famous? Am I supposed to know who she is? She makes herself seem all important on her website, and earns enough money from cookbooks and cooking classes to live on the Upper West Side alone. Maybe she was offended because I didn't know who she was...

I also met someone who made a comment about never being able to teach at a community college (vs. being a researcher at a top university), because people would look down on him, even if he enjoyed teaching far more than doing research-- Would you rather have better social status and hate what you do than have lesser social status but love what you do? I should hope not. I guess I can detect the same hungering for status inside me, but I've never had the boldness to say it so bluntly: "Wouldn't you not want to teach because people would look down on you?"

SMART goals

The staffer at the company I work for recommended some three months ago that I should make a set of 5 SMART goals.

Goals that are SMART are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Tangible. Being the P that I am (that’s P according to the Myers Briggs personality types), I have failed to even come up with one goal, but I’d like to try to make a few now (and see if I ever actually follow through):

1. Posting weekly on this blog, instead of monthly. This means being a little more spontaneous with my entries, and allowing them to be more open ended and slightly more personal. And hopefully the posting can actually be more than weekly, but it’s hard to predict the eb and flow of workload. For awhile, I really wanted my entries to be polished, but this is a blog, not graduate school.

2. I would also like to finish knitting the sweater that I’m working on …. by February. And then start knitting socks. En route to becoming what Armine’s girlfriend has dubbed ‘kninja’. (I’ve already knit two scarves that are soon to be gifts! Pictures are below, modeled on Matt. I think he should pursue a modeling career—he's certainly mastered the aloof and distant facial expressions).

3. Call my family twice a week, instead of once.

4. Write atleast one meaningful letter or email to someone each week.

I can’t think of anything more right now. Let’s see if these goals stay SMART, or whether they will become SMRT (Specific, Measured, Realistic, Tangible, but not Attained).

the problem with education

Nothing coherent here since I'm not sure how I feel about the issue, but here are couple of dangling thoughts and responses to things I've been reading*:

John Derbyshire critiques educational theorists in his article "The Dream Palace of Educational Theorists" in The New English Review for making faulty assumptions about human nature, namely that we are a blank slate, on which nurture is everything, and nature is negligible.

[Do I want to believe his assertion that the course of our lives are already inscribed into our DNA? Not really, though I will admit that freedom as conceived by postmoderns, is an illusion and a farce (appropriately so, that freedom has no essence). Is then my only other option to be one of those crazy left-wing liberals who believe more government funds means social transformation? I hope not.]

A few noteworthy excerpts unrelated to John Derbyshire's main point, that take a jab at today's "education" system:

"Towering over all these lesser scams is the college racket, a vast money-swollen credentialing machine for lower-middle-class worker bees. American parents are now all resigned to the fact that they must beggar themselves to purchase college diplomas for their offspring, so that said offspring can get low-paid outsource-able office jobs, instead of having to descend to high-paid, un-outsource-able work like plumbing, carpentry, or electrical installation.**"

"Professionals have their own credentialing systems: You may have graduated law school, but you’ll still have to pass the bar exam, and so on. Then why make aspiring lawyers go to law school? Presumably for the same reason we insist on cube jockeys having bachelor’s degrees from accredited four-year colleges. Why not let them study up at home from Teaching Company DVDs, then sit for a state-refereed common exam when they feel they’re ready? Why not let lawyers learn on the job from books and as articled clerks, the way they used to? I don’t know. College-going is just an irrational thing we do, the way upper-class German men used to acquire dueling scars, the way women in imperial China had their feet bound. Griggs vs. Duke Power probably has something to do with it. Since, following that decision, employers are not permitted to test job applicants to see how intelligent they are, the employers seek a college degree as a proxy for intelligence."

It's beginning to resemble the corporation***. Creating needs that were not there before so that the organization can justify its own existence. How very cyclical (it's almost like a perpetual motion machine!) and meaningless.

* I've finally realized that if I wait until I have coherent thoughts before making a posting. I NEVER post anything. And when I do, someone always manages to refute my argument, rendering it as obsolete and useless as a undergraduate degree :)
** A good article on this very subject is Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford in the New Atlantis
*** And by corporation, I mean the EVIL CORPORATION. I have to write that in caps because I can't take myself seriously when I say that. That terms been thrown around so much I'm not sure what it means anymore.