Her death was announced by (Tila) Tequila on her Twitter page and confirmed by police.

WHAT!  Well, it’s not really that appalling because this sort of thing seems to be happening more and more.  But what is striking to me is the way that technology and celebrity are superseding established institutions, like law enforcement.  And that gives me ideas.   I have dismissed Twitter for so long, protesting its ubiquity and the propensity for Tweeters to engage in inane banter.  This is all still true, but I’ve seen some good things come out of Twitter, and I guess it just depends on what you use it for.  This whole thing reminds me of my goal to use innovative technology to organize communities.  Twitter is, like it or not, becoming more of a mainstream avenue for communication– Almost like a new, semi-public form of email.  I’m still reluctant to fully emerge myself in Tweeting, but there are definite opportunities to disrupt the status quo, whether it be mainstream media, law enforcement or higher education.  My theory is that as this decade goes on and as technology becomes more relevant to our actual lives, the digital divide will close and hopefully call attention to more marginalized voices on the internet.  That’s one of my goals for 2010, anyway:  To discover how to cultivate active online communities and create a forum for people to access progressive ideas.

One step at a time.

So I guess the financial sector is pretty comfortable with thumbing their nose at the rest of America, even after everything that went down this year.  ::SIGH::

Back Then: I had just graduated college and was adjusting to my new and exciting full-time job as an organizer for a labor union.  It was fun– I got to travel a lot, and I met a bunch of great, interesting people (some of whom I’m lucky enough to still call friends) but I had no permanent home and was growing restless of becoming increasingly rootless.

Now: I have not one, but two jobs (technically one job and one internship) that I absolutely love.  I’ve got an apartment that I love with a great roommate in a neighborhood that I love being a part of and I’m growing to really consider maybe thinking about saying that I might like New York city, just a little bit.  I work a lot of hours, and my room is never clean, but I get challenged every single day and never do I feel complacent.  But I am happy.  And that’s pretty nice.  (The only constant is my seeming inability to form coherent sentences around attractive men, but even that’s getting better every day, ha!)

Bad things have happened in my life in these past two years, for sure.  And I definitely think about them from time to time.  I’m absolutely nothing if not a cynic– I was so glad that Obama won, but I knew deep down in my heart that the systemic inequality that exists in this country have roots so deep that they will always be our foundation no matter what side of the aisle the President is from.  But I’m also a mess of contradictions:  In spite of the example I just gave, I know that I want to spend a great deal of my life trying to prove that side of my brain wrong.  I recognize these two very distinct aspects of my personality and I don’t see them as conflicting so much as I derive inspiration to fuel my inner passions.  As much as possible, I try to take the good with the bad and take away lessons on how to go forward.  I try to learn from my mistakes, but like everyone else, I’m also human.

That said, I think that’s the most honest, unedited touchy-feely self-reflective paragraph you will read on this blog.  If you’re thinking about dropping in here from time to time, (and please do!) you can expect to see a few of the following things:

• Thoughts about pop culture, from high brow to low brow. No “Twilight” junk though– that’s where I draw the line.
• Political commentary. As you can tell by the URL and some of the older posts, I started this blog as an outlet for thoughts about political activism and other progressive issues.  That’s still what I spend most of my time thinking about, so don’t be surprised if you see it lurking these pages.
• Some personal stuff. Not like the Diaryland I had when I was 16 or anything like that, but things that are relevant to my life– pictures of Chicago and those sorts of things.  No Dashboard Confessional song lyrics or anything like that.
• Things I think are super cool. Because my taste is that good and I want to share it with the world.

Those are the main things, but don’t be surprised if you see other topics because I’ve never been one for following rules or sticking to resolutions.  I’m sure you’ll find that this blog will jump all over the Interesting/Relevant Matrix* from “Kim Kardashian’s Twitter Feed” to “Why is Katie Couric Dancing Like This?” to “Why Isn’t This On HuffPo?”  and everywhere in between.  I’m excited for restarting this project!  Can’t wait to hear feedback from time to time.

*If I were less of a lazy blogger, I would have popped open Photoshop and assembled a picture for you, Dear Reader.  I promise to work on that.  I also promise to redesign at some point.

I mean, using the signature, universally-recognized components of Michael Jackson’s essence as a eulogy to the most popular one-man musical empire of all time as a medium to promulgate the sonic inhumanity that is the new sound of young America?  That’s poetry, my friend.

Let’s see…a year ago today, I was probably in either Iowa or Chicago.  I had just spent a week in Ames hanging out with one of my favorite people in the world (Alex!) and I was about to make an unexpected extended layover in Chicago.  This is when I first found out that my beloved Granny had Cancer.  I knew it was something serious, but I never figured what would happen next.  Sometimes I see my life as “Before” and “After” huge events– I think everyone has the tendency to do this, but this one has particularly affected me.  Before sometime in early August 2008, I had no idea that people close to me would Die.  Obviously, I recognized that they would die, in a lowercase and abstract sense, but death was still a concept that was very foreign to me.  Besides a couple of distant relatives and my uncle when I was too young to realize what was going on, the closest I had been to Death the proper noun was my dog Taylor, who died one morning in the summer after I turned 21.  I had known Taylor since I was 10 and we moved to our new house on Quincy Street, and the two of us were quite the partners in crime.  My life before my Granny died was quite a different thing– I was a lot more sheltered and fearful of showing my feelings.  I was comfortable in some sense of the word, but I know there were always things holding me back.  Now, though, I realize the importance of telling people how I feel the moment I feel it because before you know it, there may not be enough time.

I don’t know if I can properly convey the difficulty of knowing that the words you say to someone may be the last you can ever say to them, but I know it was hard for me.  What can you possibly say?  ”I love you” is a cliché and besides, everyone knows you love them and it’s nice to hear it, but what about something with a little more feeling behind it?  I remember the last words that my Granny ever said, and that’s something special.  The nurse at her bedside asked her if she knew who I was (lucidity was not taken for granted at this point) and she said “of course I do, that’s my baby.”  God, I can’t tell you how that felt.  I’m not a very good writer, so really, I can’t even begin to describe the emotion that welled up inside of me.  (That’s another thing: Everyone always talks about these emotions that you can’t possibly know until you go through it.  I never understood that until After.)  These were my Granny’s last words– I was her baby.  It’s just an understanding that we came to somewhere along the way, and I think that was the way we liked it.

I read a bunch of things about death when my family was going through this.  I guess it was some sort of morbid curiosity, but I remember devouring Wikipedia articles about near death experiences and about what physically happens to someone when they die.  That’s the part I am still afraid of.  I wasn’t afraid to talk to my Granny in this state, but I was afraid of seeing her body or being all alone in her house as it happened.  I was afraid I wouldn’t know what to do, true enough, but the biggest fear came from me not knowing how to see a woman who was so vibrant and full of life the entire time I had known her suddenly…After.  So I did things any normal person would do:  I remember going about my life in the house with her when I was there, and taking care of her cat and dog and watching Judge Mathis and listening to music, not quite in denial, but also not quite wanting to acknowledge the severity of the situation.  I think this may have been a common theme in my family during this time.  Suddenly our matriarch– the woman who had taken care of each and every one of us– needed to be taken care of.  I think most of us half expected her to leap out of bed at a moment’s notice, feisty as ever, and get up and work in the yard.  So we went about our business, trying to restore some sense of normalcy to our lives, which had been turned upside down in the most unimaginable way possible.

Granny loved cooking, and was especially famous for her 7Up pound cakes.  These were creations that she had gotten so good at making that she would sometimes spend entire days in the kitchen churning them out, and she barely needed to measure the ingredients as she baked.  This is especially special because baking is an exact science, known for being a particularly difficult art to some precisely because of the need to measure in order to attain the desired consistency.  Like any good scientist, she sometimes carried out experiments, conducting research on subjects who most often turned out to be my mother and myself.  Most of the time it turned out fine:  Making green “slime” frosting for me because I loved Nickelodeon so much?  THAT was cool.  But I distinctly remember drawing the line at substituting grape soda for 7Up.  Anyway, these cakes were always delicious, especially when she let me eat the batter or let me eat the freshly baked cake residue that had been left on the bundt pan after prematurely placing it on a plate to be frosted.  The smell of baking was always something that made me feel like I was at home.

My mom decided to bake a cake on the last day I was in Chicago, a couple of hours before I was to return to New York.  I think it gave both of us comfort to take part in this activity in the house that we had both known so well as we were growing up.  I have to say, there was something poetic about it, something that writers a lot cornier than myself would belabor explicitly, but I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.  But I remember my mom taking more pride in making that particular cake on that particular day than I had ever seen her investing in a project in my life.  She still needed to measure the ingredients because her eyes had not yet seen as much as Granny’s had, and so weren’t yet adjusted to such fine details, but there was every bit the amount of love placed it in that I know Granny put into it.

That was the same day that the social worker came to Granny’s house and told me that I had very little time to say the things I needed to say.  Something that adds to the difficulty of talking to someone in that state is not knowing if they hear you or not.  Toward the end of your life, a lot of times people lose the ability to speak, but oftentimes they can hear you, even if they can’t show it.  But still, I wondered if what I was saying was relevant, and another thing that I was overly concerned with was not speaking as if she was going to die.  Obviously this was the elephant in the room.  We ALL knew what was going on, but I thought about how I might feel if people were suddenly saying their farewells to me.  I knew she would probably be concerned about my well-being and my family’s ability to cope with losing her.  If there was anything she instilled in all of us, it was a sense of perseverance that frankly often manifests itself as stubbornness.  Still, we were all human and none of us are immune to feeling profound senses of loss and as a health care professional, she probably knew that we would go through a lot of things after losing her.  They told me that I was supposed to give her permission to leave us, to tell her that she could let go because we’d all be okay.

So I ended up thanking her for all the things I probably didn’t elaborate on when it mattered.  Thank you for beating me at Scrabble, because now I win nearly every game of it that I play.  Thank you for taking me to Chuck E. Cheese when I was a kid.  Thanks for playing Redd Foxx records for me when my mom said I was too young to listen to it.  Thank you for slipping me sips of scotch when my mom wasn’t looking.  Thanks for that time I saw you and ACORN at City Hall speaking out against the Big Box resolution in Chicago.  Thank you for letting me read medical books at your house and telling me scary stories and giving me candy and giving me manicures.  But most of all, Granny, I think you should know that Mommy and I baked a cake today and it’s gonna be okay, because she’s teaching me how to make it and I’ll make it for my kids and they’ll make it for theirs.  I am going to miss you a lot because I love you, but I want you to know that it’s going to be okay and I will always remember the things you taught me.

A few hours later, my life officially made the transition from Before to After.  Before, the cakes my grandmother made were just a hobby, something in the background that made her happy and was delicious, but wasn’t as special as it is to me now. Now I try not to take things for granted.  Even the little details in life are important these days.  I plan to use the days that I have in New York to try to stay in touch with myself and let people know I care and live life to the fullest.  I made a vow sometime After that I wouldn’t spend time with endeavors that made me unhappy and that I would try to seize the moment whenever I could.  I’m still working on the latter, but I’m so grateful that I found meaning through such an uncertain time in my life.  I’m hoping I can keep that lesson at heart for years to come.

Pig in Lipstick

Well, as Gawker and others reported on Monday, it looks like Jill Greenberg is in a bit of a sticky situation with The Atlantic after she posted some rather unflattering retouched images of the outtake photos she did for McCain’s cover shoot.

Personally, I didn’t think the actual cover was all that flattering in the first place, and it’s no surprise that apparently Greenberg wanted it that way. I think that The Atlantic‘s backpedaling is nothing more than a fantastic example of cowardly journalism. Yes, you hired a photographer to do a cover for your magazine. But no, you definitely don’t have the right to defame said photographer for manipulating her own images– especially if a few minutes of Googling would have been enough to vet out any potential pesky liberals.

Of course right-wing hatemonger and all-around nasty human being Michelle Malkin weighs in on the issue, and this might be the one time that I will ever, EVER even remotely agree with anything she says…and even in this case, it’s just the line where she says that The Atlantic should have, you know, actually vetted their vice presidential candidate cover photographer.

Not that I think all this “outrage” is in any way justified.  Journalism and photography…they’re all about taking risks.  If The Atlantic didn’t want to take a chance with a potentially “controversial” photographer, they should have done their job.
]]> http://skyscrapersolidarity.com/2008/09/17/mccainphotomixup/feed/ 0 skyscrapersolidarity McCain http://skyscrapersolidarity.com/2008/08/21/hiatus/ http://skyscrapersolidarity.com/2008/08/21/hiatus/#comments Thu, 21 Aug 2008 20:35:37 +0000 skyscrapersolidarity http://skyscrapersolidarity.wordpress.com/?p=66 ]]> Well, folks, I have been on a bit of a hiatus lately. You can blame it on loss of inspiration, loss of love, loss of appetite…The world keeps spinning, I stop blogging, life goes on undocumented. But never fear, loyal readers (are there any yet?) because I am writing this entry today to hereby announce my long-awaited return to the Blogosphere!

Heartache can only last so long before you have to pull yourself out of it and go on with life. So here I am. Stay tuned.

“Spirit of Truth” never gets old, I guarantee you

OH NO HE DI’INT…or did he?

I promise, I will update legitimately soon.

In the meantime, I’ll tell you some things I’ve been thinking about this week:
-Ayah Young has a great article about the “Stop Snitching” movement and its ties with the Black community and hip-hop music
-Krazy Klinton Kampaigning: Harlem-based Clinton-supportin’ Reverend James David Manning calls Obama a “pimp” in his sermomn
-What? WHY? WTF??!?!?!!!?!!!?!!!11one
-Hey! My boss was on “Hardball with Chris Matthews”!
-Robin Blackburn’s take on the Bear Stearns/JP Morgan Chase love affair and what it could mean for social reform