January 2008 Archives

In the process of updating the links that appear in the right-hand sidebar of this blog, I came across the following information, products, recipes, videos, and other assorted delights:

>> "I want to Barack your world" valentines from an Etsy.com seller. Topical!

>> Butternut squash macaroni and cheese recipe. I can't emphasize enough how much you won't regret this.

>> Watch this Philadelphia lady make her awesome block print shirts on MARTHA! If you're having a baby you're getting one of these.

>> Five Awesome Girls is an offshoot of my favorite YouTube project of 2008, Brotherhood 2.0. Harry Potter references abound (and go over my head), but these are the kind of teenagers you're relieved to find out exist.

>> "When you look at the enormous communal plate you feel you the luckiest motherfucker of all time." Let Mindy Kaling - better known as Kelly Kapoor on NBC's The Office - take you on a tour of everything you should buy even if you can't afford it, including the Ethiopian food she's describing in the above quote.

While I'm at it, I also have to give kudos to Facebook. Never have I loved a social networking website so deeply for its ability to connect me with people I like on an informal, low-pressure basis. I mean, I just became friends with my dad's former boss-slash-mentor's wife, who is at least 60 years old, and who used to send me awesome Mac-based computer game prototypes on floppy disk when I was just a wee baby geek in grade school. This is so cool, is it not?

Over the past few years, the Harry Potter phenomenon has made it kosher for responsible adults to carry around literature intended for kids. And not only to be seen reading children’s books in public—to obsess over them. Grown people don’t hesitate to discuss the finer points of quidditch on electronic discussion boards, compose songs about wizardry as an intelligent career move, or dress up as teenaged sorcerers in anticipation of each new book’s release.

All this is quite a relief to me, personally. Although I read a lot of fiction intended for adults, I have failed to abandon—and, in fact, often prefer—the types of books I read in high school. These days I have a bonafide professional reason for it: I’m four credits away from becoming a public librarian, and public librarians need to know What The Kids Are Into. But that aside, I don’t think I could give up the world of young adult fiction anyway. It’s too fun, too morbidly humiliating and exhilarating, too emotionally complex—and, these days, too well-written...

>> Read more about my Top Ten Young Adult Books for Grown-Ups at catapult magazine.

>> Revisit your favorite teen lit of yore - including the witch-tastic Summer of Fear by Lois Duncan - at Jezebel's Fine Lines reviews.

Living vicariously through my dear friend and international relief superstar Sarah M. is an old pastime of mine. Most recently, she realized my ultimate fantasy of appearing on a public radio program.

Far better her than me, though - only Sarah could speak so eloquently about the issue at hand on PRI's The World, namely gender-based violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She is the GBV coordinator for a large aid organization there, where she works with women whose bodies are used as pawns in violent conflict.

>> Listen to Sarah on PRI's The World, or read the full transcript of the interview.

A month ago, I sat in a funky Brookline hair salon with Sarah, catching up at the beginning of her holiday leave. She was still jet-lagged and culture-shocked, and the first order of business (after breakfast) was a cut and color. I ended up asking her about the women she knows in DRC, and why the hell so many of them are getting raped, and what the hell anybody could do about it.

(I can only guess what the stylist, coating Sarah's hair with dye and folding it carefully into aluminum foil squares, thought about this conversation. Possibly "God, lighten up and read Marie Claire, already.")

Sarah's stories, and her partly sad, partly angry, completely fatigued statement that "I'm really tired of rape," haven't left me since. Neither has her reply to a question I asked the previous evening, almost hypothetically, during a discussion about Philip Pullman's Golden Compass series. I was blathering about the tension between free will and determinism in the books, explaining how a dictatorial church would stop at nothing to prevent the heroine from causing a second fall. I think I asked something like, "If you had the chance to prevent the fall, even if it meant taking away free will, would you? I wouldn't."

I wasn't even sure Sarah was still awake at that point, a glass of wine tilting precariously in her hand, the jet lag taking over. "I would," she said, suddenly looking at me, smiling her Sarah half-smile. I saw a lot of things in her sleepy eyes just then.

She says she's tired of rape. She's more cosmopolitan, a true expatriate, than the last time I saw her; more detached from her work in a necessary, healthy way than she has been in the past. One must be blase after a certain point, or else live in a non-stop hell of emotions, fear, hatred, hope, despair.

But here is a woman who has seen what people can do to each other, and who says she would stop it all if she could. It left me feeling conflicted, and gladder than ever to call her my friend.

More about DRC gender-based violence:
> NYT: Rape Epidemic Raises Trauma of Congo War (with excellent slideshow)
> Eve Ensler reports in Glamour
> Anderson Cooper on the DRC conflict

(Hi, by the way. I am unceremoniously back.)