Theresa Ines tonight at the Beehive

O sonho é
Pra cada mulher
O que se faz
O que se quer
E vai
Vai seguindo como dá
Junta tudo o que se tem
E espera um novo alguém

All women
Have the same dream
To be true
To our heart's desires
And keep moving
The way we can
Gathering all we have learned
To share with someone new

Sounds familiar. Sounds like it could be true, but is it?

Are you Happy? Sad? Jealous?

This last week's economist ran an ad that started "Are you Happy? Sad? Jealous?; Understanding the importance of your emotions in 24 lectures from an award winning professor." It's an odd little course you can order from Dr Robert C Solomon and the write-up goes on to claim that,

"By probing these thinkers and presenting his own views, The Passions: Philosophy and the Intelligence of Emotions will lead you to a remarkable conclusion: Emotions have intelligence and provide personal strategies that are vitally important to our everyday lives of perceiving, evaluating, appraising, understanding, and acting in the world."

Maybe it was reading those words, or the hours of what I now realize was subconscious agonizing that finally put a light bulb over my head. Either way, something became clear yesterday when a work colleague gave me some mixed news. She told me, that she had a clandestine wedding - she got married after 5 months of dating some guy - and that she was quitting the job next month because "consulting was just not for her." Putting aside the fact that she is probably not telling me the whole story, the news washed over me in waves of unfamiliar emotions. I felt ... cold shock, followed by a brief dip into sadness and then a brightening, clear, honest jealousy.

That's right, jealousy... and it felt so good because with it came realization... no, I do not want to be married right now, but I do want to be free of this job. It has nothing to do with my ability to get the job done. No one at this point could possibly accuse me of laziness. It's not even that I am not cut out for the work force. I simply derive very little pleasure from the work I do and the people I work for. In fact, now that I am admitting things to myself, I think it has been making me a little unhappy. I have made a terrible mistake. I have made an even bigger mistake letting the job get in the way of me preparing for my future and doing the things that make me happy.

Don't worry. I am not quitting and I am not going to stop working hard. I just feel light and clear. Now I know why I have been feeling a bit off. It is resolved in my mind and now I can emotionally de-invest and reapply myself to the things in my life, present and future.

Enjoy the Arrested development reference while I try and sort out my life

Copley Square, Boston

My crappy blackberry camera doesn't do this justice. I was walking to the T past Copley Square yesterday and looked up. This is one of my favourite buldings in Boston... it is completely reflective. On a clear day, it shines bright blue and looks almost metallic. On a day like this it mimics the cloud-cover and blends into the sky...

Borges

"Hladik had rounded forty. Aside from a few friendships and many habits, the problematic exercise of literature constituted his life. Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned."

- The Secret Miracle, Borges

Some say the mark of a good writer is that they bring to light something that you think you already knew, making reading and writing the art of playing with recognition. Above, Borges has put his finger on one of my greatest fears. Hat's off to you dear sir.

I suggest you also give him a read. In this round of flirtation, I particularly liked Inferno, I, 32, The Witness, Kafka and his precursors, The Library of Babel...

My commute

Got a note from HR that I have to start paying NYC income taxes. I hit some kind of threshold. Now the constant commute to NYC is costing me more than my life; it is actually costing me money... prorated by the number of days I work in each city.

Let me tell you... two half lives do not make a whole

Must

write

think

love

The spark of feminism

"Among the many important questions which have been brought before the public, there is none that more vitally affects the human family than that which is technically called 'Women's Rights.'" Elizabeth Cady Stanton as quoted in The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler

Why are women required to be subservient to men? Why are we paid less? When did this happen?

Retired confessions

"I don't know what I want. I am hoping and I'm afraid that that's the only thing holding me back. What if I am actually held back by ability? What if I never discover a passion?"

Today I retire that confession, though it still haunts me. But I can put it behind me because I am now more sure of my ability than ever before and i am beginning to understand what is important to me. I'll - instead - let you know a little something new about me. "I am a judger. I judge people and I am not ashamed. Dont get me wrong... I understand we all have moments of weakness. I just think that expecting less than the best from someone is the worst kind of condescension; a fine line from the tyranny of lowered expectations. "

Think Less

" One of your strongest skills - your high level thinking - is irrelavant for you current position at this company." - My manager to me last monday

How utterly absurd...

The Mother Land

Hopped into a taxi the other day at Logan airport and the taxi driver wasted no time in asking where I was from.

"Jamaica" I said proudly, and he was shocked because the driver of the taxi behind him (who had seen me approach and enter this cab) had sworn that I was Ethiopian or Somalian.

Now I had never thought I was an odd looking black woman until I went to Ghana - where my people (and most Jamaican people) are actually from. There, a Ghanaian man looked at me dispairingly and said I couldn't pass. Then while I was at Oxford, back when I frequented a Lebanese store, the owner was one day shocked to discover that I couldn't speak Arabic. Apparently I have the look of some mysterious arabic-speaking people. Then I began to think... one grandad was a whitish jew, the other was a dark skinned black Cuban of unknown decent and unusual features. One grandma had the Ghanaian roots - with some Scottish (?) mixed in - and as for the other... no one really knows! I do, however, know that my brother has no cheekbones and epicantic folds in his eyelids and that my own Ghanaian people would disown me if all they had to go on was looks. Which country would open up it's arms to me? Where can I go and blend in? Everyone should have a mother land - it would be a comfort to know that while I stick out among all these Bostonians, there is somewhere where I can go and be called one of "us".

So I was thrilled when this taxi driver finally named a country for me. I have no idea what Ethiopian or Somali women look like... but perhaps they look like me :).

In Honour of My Grandpa

Is this grief I feel?

Or confirmation I've

not been sad before

Sometimes I don't even know what to do with myself. It was good that it ended, but that logic cannot fill me back up.

And who will defend me?

check this out

My friend is here visiting from NYC and we were sitting in the living room discussing the H1-B. It's that time ladies and gents. At the end of this month the lawyers will send in our applications. 50% of them will be automatically rejected - randomly chosen to not even be considered. The other 50% will await the kindness of the US government to see if we can continue to work here.

As if our futures were not uncertain enough there is the added complication of the bail-out, the stimulus bill, the depressed economy. My friend is telling me that companies on the TARP - troubled asset relief programme - are not allowed to apply for work visas for their foreign employees. "Buy American" has become "Hire American" and is disturbing in both spirit and effect. Every time there is a problem this coutry kind of rolls up into a ball - like an armadillo, or Buster from Arrested Development. Will they do more harm than good this time? we will have to wait and see....

Ahoy G20!

I got published!!!

Math! How I love thee!

Afghani woman on self immolation

"Don't burn yourself," she said, lying on her hospital bed. "If you want a way out, use a gun: it's less painful."

from here

One of my roomies was signing up to see a shrink. So they asked her a few questions to match her up with someone suitable. They asked, of course, "Do you have thoughts of suicide?" And my roomie told me that she was shocked. Suicide is not even an option, she said.

It's one thing to think suicide is not an option. It's another thing to understand how it would seem like an option to some hypothetical body. It's a third stance to consider it for yourself day in and day out, or maybe late at night when considering what you should do tomorrow. C is not healthy I gather. Is option B toeing the line? And what about that afghani woman? Is there a difference between suicide from depression and suicide as the last and only act of independence?

Either way, sounds like it hurts. BTW I am reading Sylvia Plath.

P.S. Do Jamaicans commit suicide?

The Outliers - Malcolm Gladwell

Just finished this book today while stranded in a tunnel on a delayed outbound Red-Line T(rain) ride to Davis. (I'm glaring at YOU MBTA)! I felt a small smug feeling when I found out - in the last chapter - that Gladwell is of Jamaican decent.

Otherwise the book just left me with a feeling of being bombarded with interesting bits of new information, that were arranged in just the perfect way for me to be unable to draw any kind of logical conclusion. What was the point Gladwell? Was it aimed at policy makers; encouraging them to generate more opportunity? Was it aimed at the ordinary man; giving them a way to blame lack of opportunity for a lack of success? Or was it supposed to generate a kind of fatalism? You could be a genius that worked from dawn 'till dusk... Those things are necessary but not sufficient for success... you can still fail, chances are, you will fail. People will still stand in your way, things won't work out, you will be stuck in the drudgery of the everyday... unless you are granted the random opportunity given by luck to those of "good" birth, "good" means, and "good" skin colour.

What am I supposed to do now Gladwell? No answer? Thanks for nothing. Wow, I am a ray of sunshine today.

bed time haiku - I know i will never break , but...

I beg for tears now;
One drop to ease the straining
dam behind these eyes

...for the white man.

"The abilities, the intelligence, the promise of these young men will be squandered in their attempt to eke out a living doing the simplest, most mindless chores for the white man."

-Nelson Madela , Long Walk to Freedom, my copy page 33

This is exactly how I felt working for my last supervisor. Oh snap! Good riddance my friend. ha.

But will I prosper now that he is gone? We make jokes at work all about how the partners are afraid of Office 2007. We make jokes about "partner math" which is simple, slap dash math that latches on to the biggest roundest numbers on a page and yields nothing but broad estimations. Haha! so funny... Does this mean we get more stupid, dated and timid as we move up in this firm?

The more time I spend away from school the more I feel my intelligence is squandered. How do I stem this flow?

BTW I started reading Mandela's book. It was gifted to me two summers ago. It is quintissentially inspirational. Expect more quotes.

Hipsters, be free!!

"The dance floor at a hipster party looks like it should be surrounded by
quotation marks. While punk, disco and hip hop all had immersive, intimate and
energetic dance styles that liberated the dancer from his/her mental states – be
it the head-spinning b-boy or violent thrashings of a live punk show – the
hipster has more of a joke dance. A faux shrug shuffle that mocks the very idea
of dancing or, at its best, illustrates a non-committal fear of expression
typified in a weird twitch/ironic twist. The dancers are too self-aware to let
themselves feel any form of liberation; they shuffle along, shrugging themselves
into oblivion. "

-from here

I often feel the need to move freely. To dance, to fight to frolic. Where can I be free?

Authority and desire

Today I retire the confession "Me hate authority. Authorty hate me," even though that is still very true. I think I can be extremely frustrating to my supervisors not because they feel like I am incompetent, but because they see nothing standing in between them and what they want from me except my own stubborn unresponsive will. The problem is, they can't make me want what they want, mostly because ... I don't know what I want.

In other news, I went for drinks with this guy from the office. My roommate has informed me that that counts as a date. He had hinted a couple months ago that we should go out for drinks. I thought it was a casual team thing - we work together - so I was enthusiastic. Last week when he came over to ask me to drinks that night, it would be dishonest of me to say I didn't sense the date vibe. He was WAY too nervous. He hesitated, his voice stumbled, he practically whispered the invitation. I resisted the urge to run. The honest part of me was therefore not surprised when we were the only ones at the bar that night. We had fun.

Hospital Haiku (Brooklyn, summer 2008)

Pain sings like echoes
stuck rebounding between these
curving pelvic walls