Lessons in Apartment hunting

OR

"Take your imaginary boxes and paint and get out!"

(I couldn't decide which title to go with)

Claudia and I found an amazing gem of an apartment. It was a bit of a fix me up but the rent was only $1000 (lowest we have found by far) and it was in a great part of JP and we would have had our own yard. I was getting really excited about the prospect of this place! Then this morning I was talking to my boss about it and I started getting even more excited (she had friends that used to live on the street and was raving about the great potential).

By the time I got to work (I had an awesome advisory committee meeting this morning and didn't get to the main office until 1 pm) I had already had apartment painting parties, moved in, had a house warming party, started a garden, had a couple BBQs, bought a bike, biked around to games and other various events, participated in block parties, and lovingly live in my apartment for a couple to a few years. Unfortunately when I sat down at my desk I found this e-mail:

Hi Melanie. We had several people come to the apartment

last night and it was taken right away for April 1.

Good luck in your apartment search!
Samantha

Claudia pointed that "the bitch" didn't have to be so chipper about the whole thing. She also (as the seasoned apartment hunter) told me that you cannot "mentally move in" before you have paid your deposit (let alone before you even see the place).

Lesson learned, lesson learned.

I'm taking and things and mourning my loss and looking for a new love to take my lost loves place.

Lessons in Dating

1. Don't count your chickens before they've hatched

2. Listen to your instincts, if you get the feeling they're not too interested you're probably right.

3. Don't broadcast dates because you're just gonna have to tell all those people when it ends.

4. Don't be serious before it's serious- just have fun.

5. Don't convince yourself you like someone just because you are excited about the prospect of dating.

*******************

These are all good things to learn since as said before I have very little experience with dating.

Mike, I know you're shaking your head right now- clearly I have a lot more to learn from you.

Adventures in Grown-up Land

Sometimes I have to be a grown-up and it is difficult.

For example, I have begun cooking for myself for the first time. This in of itself is difficult- sometimes I don't eat until 10 pm because I am cooking for hours! Anyway, I have found that there are some things about food that I was not blessed with an innate knowledge of. Earlier in the year I tried freezing my produce to ensure its long life- instead I killed it in one night. Last week a recipe I was making called for the use of a bay leaf. I thought it was odd that it just said "add one Bay Leaf" and not "crumple up the bay leaf"....so that is what I did. I took out a bay leaf and crumpled it into little pieces and put it in my pasta- I assumed it would get soft with the sauce. Fast forward 3 steps and the recipe says "remove bay leaf and serve"..."Shit!" I can't remove the Bay Leaf, it is in tiny little pieces.

So here I am, three days later, eating my pasta for lunch and chewing every bit thoroughly so I can find those nasty bay leaf bits and spit them out before they scratch my throat!

Healthy Living Tip of the day:

To reduce your chance of catching one of the many colds that fly around this time of year- add ginger, cinnamon and horseradish to your diet. These herbs have warming and antiseptic qualities that will help you fight off colds!

fresh ginger

In Celebration of Mass Genocide?

I know that this is no longer a radical or unusual thing to say but: Why do I not have work today? Why does my daily organizer say Columbus Day? Why are we still celebrating today as a holiday?

I suppose an argument could be made as to why today can be celebrated, we are here and Columbus is the person who sparked European interest to go West. Regardless of whether it should be celebrated or not, the devastating affect that Columbus, the conquistadors, and the multitude of early settlers had on the natives and the land should not go unmentioned and should receive at least equal reflection.

A few things: It is queer to name Columbus the discoverer of the New World when he himself died thinking he had reached Asia, and had no idea that he in fact had reached a land mass relatively unknown in Europe. Columbus has even less to do with the discovery of what today is the USA, since he only ever set foot on the islands of the Caribbean. I believe Ponce de Leon was the first of the conquistadors to "discoverer" North America- he landed on Florida in 1513.

The following are excerpts from the first chapter of Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States", it's a great book and it reads like a novel. Columbus' contribution to the world:

"...They found no gold fields, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend. In the year 1495 (this was during Columbus' second voyage), they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route..."

"But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.

The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed."

"...Among the Arawaks, mass suicides began, with cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead."

And that was just the beginning...in total Columbus and his men are believed to have been responsible for the death of up to 3 million (some say 8) Natives and the complete genocide of the Arawaks. The Arawaks were a people who swam out to meet the Santa Maria, showering its captain and crew with gifts, but to their great demise one of those gifts was made of gold.

Howard Zinn concludes his chapter:

"Was all this bloodshed and deceit...a necessity for the human race to progress from savagery to civilization?...Perhaps an argument can be made- as it was made by Stalin when he killed peasants for industrial progress in the Soviet Union, as it was made by Churchill explaining the bombings of Dresden and Hamburg, and Truman explaining Hiroshima. But how can the judgment be made if the benefits and losses cannot be balanced because the losses are either unmentioned or mention quickly?

That quick disposal might be acceptable ("Unfortunate, yes, but it had to be done") to the middle and upper classes of the conquering and "advanced" countries. But is it acceptable to the poor of Asia, Africa, Latin America, or to the prisoners in Soviet labor camps, or the blacks in urban ghettos, or the Indians on reservations- to the victims of that progress which benefits a privileged minority in the world?...And even the privileged minority- must it not reconsider, with that practicality which even privilege cannot abolish, the value of its privileges, when they become threatened by the anger of the sacrificed, whether in organized rebellion, unorganized riot, or simply those brutal individual acts of desperation labeled crimes by law and the state?

If there are necessary sacrifices to be made for human progress, is it not essential to hold to the principle that those to be sacrificed must make the decision themselves?..."

"Beyond all that, how certain are we that what was destroyed was inferior? Who were these people who came out on the beach and swam to bring presents to Columbus and his crew..."

"...Before the arrival of the European explorers, they were using irrigation canals, dams, were doing ceramics, weaving baskets, making cloth out of cotton."

"...The concept of private ownership of land and homes was foreign to the Iroquois (a nation of five separate tribes who lived in present day New York)...'No poorhouses are needed among them, because they are neither mendicants nor paupers....Their kindness, humanity and courtesy not only makes them liberal with what they have, but causes them to posses hardly anything except in common.

Women were important and respected in Iroquois society. Families were matrilinear...When a woman wanted a divorce, she set her husband's things outside the door."

"...The senior women in the village named the men who represented the clans at village and tribal councils. They also named the forty-nine chiefs who were the ruling council for the Five Nation confederacy of the Iroquois. The women attended the clan meetings, stood behind the circle of men who spoke and voted, and removed the men from office if they strayed too far from the wishes of the women."

"Children in Iroquois society, while taught the cultural heritage of their people and solidarity with the tribe, were also taught to be independent, not to submit to overbearing authority. They were taught equality in status and the sharing of possessions. "

"So Columbus and his successors were not coming into an empty wilderness, but into a world which in some places was as densely populated as Europe itself, where the culture was complex, where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations among men, women, children and nature were more beautifully worked out than perhaps any place in the world."

"...They paid careful attention to the development of personality, intensity of will, independence and flexibility, passion and potency, to their partnership with one another and with nature. "

*****************************************************************************

That was a little longer than I intended, but I really love this book, and it sums up a lot of the most interesting works I read in college. I really believe in everything that I copied down here and the telling of these stories is why I think I want to teach history.

So, as you "celebrate" (read: sit on your couch watching TV instead of at your desk in front of a computer screen) today keep in mind what the real celebration is about. Never forget to question all that you have been taught. Just because this type of history isn't as buried as it used to be, doesn't mean that we should stop talking about it. I know it sounds risky or corney, but try mentioning the truth about today to someone else...word of mouth can be very powerful.

Kali- what the heck would we do without the internet- Down

So a few months back I was googling my then girlfriend's ex-girlfriend (we have since broken up and she is back together with said ex) Kali, and I stumbled onto her marathon page. She had already completed the Boston Marathon (I can't even imagine!) but had been unsuccessful in meeting her projected fundraising goal. After reading her little blurb I was inspired to donate and believed that hitting anonymous meant that she would not realize who the donation came from. I was shocked to learn that my donation was anonymous to everyone except her! Of course she found my out of the blue donation very unsettling and called Cameron. She eventually settled down, decided that the only fitting course of action was to google me and then promptly e-mailed me about it. Her e-mail was kind and we went back and fourth a bit, anyway, this is all to highlight how she signed off on the last e-mail: "kali- what the heck did people do before the internet?- down".

In my return e-mail to Kali I signed off as: "melanie- there was a time before internet?- lafav". I started thinking about how attached I was to the internet and other new fandangled comforts like my cell phone. For a while I lamented this attachment and wished that I was not so dependent on all this technology. After spending a week "without" internet I have changed my mind!

Without is in quotes because its not like I went to a remote village in Mali like my amazing friend Neda who has been working with the Peace Corps for over a year. No, by without I mean that due to billing problems I was unable to access the internet in the comfort of my own home. This fact stressed me out beyond all belief. Everyday I woke up wishing that I could check my e-mail to see if some far off loved one had e-mailed about their life, or more important if DPH had e-mail me about the "informal" job offer they made. I went to work and struggled through my day barely able to contain the feeling that I was missing out on some amazing opportunity due to my inability to jump on-line at a moments notice. A couple of times I called my mother and had her go into my various inboxes. Of course every time I finally was able to access my e-mail there were very few important messages.

I eventually found myself in the Boston Public Library, waiting again and again to use the 15 minuet express computer (by this time I had initiated a new e-mail relationship with the lady I am interested). Finally I made my way to my own public library in Somerville- right down the street. I am now the proud holder of a library card- my first since moving to Massachusetts over 5 years ago. While in the library I found a book by Joe Namath on Football for Young Players- oh yes I am very serious about my new sport!

Moral of the story- do not underestimate the importance of home internet access, you never realize how much you rely on it until it is gone (e-mail, yellow pages, mapquest, news, blogs, etc). But don't let home internet access and its ability to connect you to people and ideas all over the world keep you from becoming invested in your local community- go get a library card!

Hey Mel....what do you think of this Mel?

I just made my first attempt at making my blog more colorful by writing an entry that was story like... I didn't think it was great, but it wasn't bad either and I spent a good half an hour writing it. Then something happened and it all disappeared! Now I wont ever have the energy to re-write it and I'll have to wait before I can decide if I am capable of writing a story like post.

The basic point of the post was: people should not call other people by their generic nickname (ie Mel rather than Melanie) unless one of these four conditions are in play:

1) You have a personal relationship
2) You have asked
3) You have been told
4) You are at a sporting event cheering on a player

...otherwise it is just weird and kind of unsettling.