Breathing in, I know that I am breathing in
Posted by: lucie
Well, it's time! Time to pack a small bag of clothes and sutras, board a plane and head off to a peaceful retreat center to... you know, breathe a lot, meditate, disconnect from conventional reality, rearrange the head a bit. All while basking in the presence of the very amazing Thich Nhat Hanh. I am a lucky, lucky, lucky girl.
Regarding the online identity crisis and consideration of ditching this blog for a new one, I'll think about it for a while but doubt I'm ready. Two main things I've realized: 1) I'm not enough of an authority on anything in particular to start a blog that would benefit my career or as-yet-undefined life's work, and 2) I just may not be capable of compartmentalizing my thoughts well enough to pull it off anyway. It's nice to have the freedom to skip between economics, obsessive people, family drama, boys begging for your phone number and Buddhist retreats without worrying about who's reading. So... Lucie lives. For now.
Note to self: try not to fall for any ultra-serious, not-dating-anyone-for-a-year celibate Buddhist boys, or make any plans re: marriage and kids. One fake long distance email boyfriend is enough (possibly too much).
Alright, that's enough from me. Take care, everyone, and keep that world turning while I'm incommunicado.
drama
Posted by: lucie
A funny thing happens whenever I spend more than a day or two with any given member of my family: I bug out. Stuff I generally ignore gets thrown back in my face and I have a good freakout, complete with floods of tears, then wake up oddly calm, reaffirm my personal philosophy that there is no sense in dwelling, that some things will never be figured out, that the only thing to do is live well and transcend the past.
So, last night was that night. The night for sitting across the table from my little sister, talking about our parents, crying, sharing confusion about the years neither of us remember clearly, if at all. Asking questions like wait, so you never got hit? Ever? That's so weird. Sharing assessments of home videos: older sister could never do anything right, little sister was the baby and always coddled, I was generally off doing my thing as far away from the family as possible. Trading tales of mom's more memorable crazy episodes, like the time she got so disproportionately angry with us for bickering in the back of the minivan that she threw the door open with such rage as to actually rip it off the hinges. Wondering where certain people were at certain times, or why none of the three of us could put together a basic narrative of what went on when. Discussing dad's drinking habits, absence and general inflexibility, lies and manipulation. Trying to assess exactly how disconnected from reality our mother was and is, wondering what kind of pills she's on now (there have been antidepressants, hormones, ADD meds, naturopathic remedies - it changes up as regularly as her self-diagnosis), discussing her latest martyriffic email.
The confusion runs circles around us. No one can remember much, save that it was pretty grim. The fog of war. Mom and dad are still infuriatingly self-righteous and insist on controlling the story of the past. Older sister is too deeply imbalanced to offer any serious explanations. Dad is too manipulative to be trusted in recounting the past. Mom doesn't seem to remember anything off-color, which is and isn't surprising given she was generally in bed with a migraine when she wasn't screaming, yelling or dragging someone up the stairs by the hair, and me, there's just mostly a big black hole up until age 12 or so. Then there's the whole post-divorce timeframe, in which my sisters stopped talking to my mother for something like five years, dad stopped talking to me because I didn't stop talking to mom, my sisters stopped speaking to me for reasons I still don't understand, and I moved further and further away from home and felt better and better with each additional thousand miles I put between us.
People talk like you have to make peace with your family, resolve the past and enjoy what time you have with them because life is short. I don't buy it. Families can be toxic, people can be bad for you, and there's nothing healthy about playing a role you've outgrown with people who refuse to change.
A Christmas-card/birthday-card relationship would be ideal.
Your phone number!
Posted by: lucie
Tonight was the night I've needed for weeks - brilliant in every way. It began with amazing music and ended with a boy running down the street after me, telling me he loved me, getting down on his knees and repeating "Your phone number. Your phone number," while making longing faces and gazing at me adoringly as though his heart would break if he didn't get it. His English: not so good. His style: clumsy, persistent, entirely unthreatening and pretty much adorable.
I don't know where this boy came from, exactly. We were at a hip hop show (me, my sister and her friend - they're in town for a week celebrating shiny new MAs in women's studies) and he appeared out of nowhere. We chatted in a broken combination of our two languages, there was a bit of a spark, he was goofy and affectionate and quickly decided we should be together. Within minutes he was putting his arm around me sweetly, grabbing me by the hand and generally acting like my boyfriend. This isn't the type of thing you'd normally let a strange boy get away with, but there was something so endearing about him that I just laughed and played along. Somehow it led to a nostalgiac 'just like my first hip hop show with a long ago boyfriend' experience, and it all seemed rather precious.
Yes, I do probably need to get out more. I'll be the first to admit that falling into an affectionate little niche with a strange goofy boy at a hip hop show is probably a sign of that. But it was just FUN, and I felt 19 again, waving my hands in the air, getting all riled up, splashing around in puddles of beer with some boy using the crowd as an excuse to press up behind me, seeing if he could get away with putting his hands on my hips when we danced, sticking with me no matter how much the beats and concertgoers jostled us around. I had a pretend boyfriend and kind of liked the warmth. He tried to kiss me a few times, but never in an aggressive way, and always apologized and laughed at himself when he got denied. He hugged me a lot. He stood behind me and wrapped his arms around my waist. He was harmless and affectionate and tall and adorable, so I let him get away with kissing me on the neck a couple times.
When the show was over, he shook my hand, thanked me and kissed me on the cheek. We left. And ten minutes later he came running down the street, huffing and puffy, declaring his love and asking for my phone number. I refused the first eight or nine times.
"You're begging," I told him.
"Your phone number," he said. "I LOVE you! Your phone number. Please, your phone number."
A lot of girls are way too cool to fall for this type of act, I know, but I'm not one of them.
My little sister snores.
Posted by: lucie
She snores hardcore. She's sawing logs in the other room, leaving me to my covert blogging when I should be sleeping. She sounds like our father, which is not good.
Thursday I leave for another month-long meditation retreat, only this time with the right teacher. I have high hopes and big aspirations. There are some commitments I need to make to myself that feel as though they may be best made in such a setting. Made and contemplated on such a retreat, they just might stick.
Things like embracing uncertainty, admitting fear and, I think, quitting drinking. It just feels like time to move on. May as well show up in my new temporary hometown and declare myself allergic to alcohol when I meet my new friends and colleagues. There, I wrote it.
Congratulations Brian
Posted by: lucie
Brian applied to MBA programs at Harvard, Stanford and Wharton when he got home from Lotus, and I've long been secretly hoping he wouldn't get in. He's 24, has an undergrad degree in finance, has seen hardly anything of the world and talked about an MBA as a ticket to a mid-six-figures salary in a financial services job, which he could no doubt easily land. But what a waste it would be. He's one of the smartest, most inquisitive people I've ever met and it's sad to imagine him settling for such a straight and narrow path.
Last guy you'd expect to end up at a place like Lotus. Well, one of the last. Smartassed, know-it-all, totally black and white worldview, mathematical as anything. He railed incessantly against literal interpretations and the general gullibility of others at the course, and you really couldn't blame him. He got especially infuriated when the teacher used numbers casually. Oh, and the Tibetan Buddhists just love to throw some numbers around. Walk around this mandala three times and all your bad Karma will be purified, all sentient beings have been your mother infinite lifetimes, and so forth.
You don't say "infinity" to a mathematician lightly. Witnessing Brian's struggle with the simply aesthetic application of this term helped me get to grips with exactly what a mammoth concept it is to those who see real meaning in numbers. Infinity. To someone who understands the world in numbers, infinity is like God, as far as I can tell. And Brian did not appreciate these Tibetans throwing his god around. So he retaliated with a simple mathematical argument against the possibility of achieving enlightenment.
It went like this:
1) Is it possible for me to attain enlightenment in this lifetime, or any given lifetime? (yes)
2) And I have lived infinite lifetimes? (yes)
3) Then why am I not a Buddha?
With this, Brian would sit back and fold his arms, completely satisfied that he'd refuted the central tenet of 2500 years of spiritual tradition. Most people didn't understand the argument, despite its very simple beauty. Those who did generally failed to realize that the only possible way out was to note that not all teachings were intended for literal interpretation, so many sputtering, frustrated encounters ensued.
But Brian also had his moments where you could see his highly systematized worldview beginning to crack, and you'd get a little feel for what got him out of his small hometown and halfway around the world. When people asked, he'd always tell them that a friend of his came back from a previous year of the course and said it had changed his life; this was generally quickly followed by a statement about how he was going to kill said friend when he returned home. Being a ruthlessly logical type with a deep, serious, extensive personal knowledge and experience of Catholicism (in which he stopped believing at the age of ten when, he recalls, he realized purely and suddenly as anything that God simply did not exist - a sad understanding that he likens to learning that your parents will one day die), he quickly saw the similarities between his own religious background and the system to which he was being exposed in Nepal. Reasoning it out, he decided he'd be better off tricking himself into believing in Catholicism, because it was probably easier to get into heaven and you could stay there for eternity rather than go round and round in this reincarnation game.
But if you got to know him a bit better, he'd tell you another reason. Namely, that a couple years ago he'd had a splitting headache for months, that doctors had been unable to diagnose it and that he'd become convinced that he was going to die. He was wrong, of course, but he believed it at the time, and that set him off on a new path of wondering what life was really about.
Anyway, Brian got home from Lotus and found he had less confidence about what he wanted to do next, exactly; less motivation to make his MBA applications. He got them in for the final round (any aspiring MBA student will tell you that the chances of being accepted to one of the top three business schools when you apply in the final round is next to nothing) and set about wondering what he might do if he wasn't accepted. He emailed me. He emailed James. James and I secretly emailed each other to share our wishes that he wouldn't get in. "Study something totally impractical. It's necessary at your age," James wrote somewhat condescendingly. "Don't do an MBA because you can't think of anything better to do - the moneymaking machine will always be there. You could study philosophy or physics or be a trapeze artist for the next ten years and still come back and get a finance job," I wrote.
So last week word came: rejection from all three. Which is unsurprising, really, as he has basically no work experience and applied at the last possible moment. A couple more years of work, an earlier application, with grades and experience and GMAT scores and a brain like his, he'd have no trouble. He's a pretty sure bet for any business school. But it seems as though this might be the beginning of a much more exciting life for our Brian.
"In all honesty I am actually quite relieved that I didn't get in," he writes. "I have come to the realization that I WAS only going because I just didn't know what to do and it seemed like the easy path."
So what now? Apparently six months in Asia is high on the list of possibilities. That's a pretty small credit card tab compared to an MBA program, but something tells me the knowledge he'd gain from it would be infinitely more valuable.
Distractions
Posted by: lucie
The problem with playing peppy, cheesey music to spur oneself along in one's studies: one quickly realizes that singing along with Billy Joel and doing algebra at the same time is rather difficult and, forced to make a choice between the two, well... here I am blogging and singing along to "An Innocent Man."
This is really bad, you know. Because I woke up this morning with this thought in my head: if I am to survive the next 18 months, I simply must manifest a love for, or at least a deep intellectual curiosity about, math and finance. Yesterday I read an MBA student's blog. She was discussing trends around hedge funds. Apparently everything is turning into one, and this is risky. I personally have no opinion about this on the grounds that I have no freaking clue what a hedge fund is. Well, today I'm going to find out, beginning with this New Yorker article about hedge funds. If they can cover it, there has to be something interesting about it, right? This proves that finance can be fascinating and human. If The New Yorker can get behind it, so can I. Perhaps I could get to grips with finance if I bought that New Yorker DVD set and read all the articles from the financial page.
If I actually thought that was a better idea than reading a couple books on finance, and I'm not saying whether I think that or not, would it make me irrational?
If you haven't listened to Billy Joel recently, I would like to point out that he really was a badass. You wouldn't let him anywhere near your sister. Billy Joel was a player, a rebel, and not half smooth with the lines (go listen to "Only The Good Die Young" and see what a tight case he makes to the Catholic girls that they should stop being so pious and just sleep with him).
Yesterday, the third day after cracking it open, I managed to finish E.F. Schumacher's "Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered." I seem to have a knack lately for picking up books in which the author expounds, very eloquently, on shreds of concepts I have just recently got my head around. Like the concept of exactly how much lies outside the realm of conventional Economics, as defined by academia. Truthfully, it was the title of this particular book that caught my attention; not any of the reviews. It jumped out at me from the little economics section of my local English-language bookstore, and I had no idea when I began to read it that it was something of a classic. I'd just been mulling over the whole 'standard organizational structure' thing - the perils of hierarchy, bureaucracy and the utter lack of inspiration that results. When you're contemplating those types of things, a book like this will likely catch your attention:
It's an intriguing mix of ethics and economics. He starts in right off the bat talking about the erroneous presuppositions on which economics is constructed, the egregious errors of failing to include natural resources on our economic balance sheets, and many other realities economists aren't supposed to discuss (and he has a PhD in it, thank God, so he can get away with this). When you encounter such words and phrases as "human wickedness," "religion" and "metaphysics" in the first two pages of a book ostensibly about economics, you know you're in for an interesting ride. I'll leave it at that but would encourage anyone interested in these types of things to go peruse the reviews and consider picking it up.
Next to enter the constant 3-book rotation: "A Brief History of Globalization : The Untold Story of our Incredible Shrinking Planet" by Alex MacGillivray.
Moving along, then: Rebecca got a Brazillian wax last week and can't stop going on about it. She's never had any kind of bikini wax, and she went in for the whole thing (except the tiny little strip). She now instant messages me on Skype from time to time to announce that she has spent the last half hour dancing around her flat like a stripper and considering booty calling an ex of whom I violently disapprove.
It's rather poetic for Rebecca to have a Brazilian wax as she is essentially celibate. Even the last guy she dated for months never got any. Becks, whom you may remember as the inventor of "The Switch," is simply convinced that it leads to more trouble than she's willing to put up with, so she holds out, like, forever. To make up for this lack of sexual indulgence, she talks about sex incessantly.
I once explained this to Tom, who was predictably stymied. When I said she hadn't had sex for 14 months, he nearly dropped his glass of wine. "Fourteen months? That's like... I used to like The Stones..." he said, voice trailing off.
All this having been said, she is so excited about the results of her incredibly painful visit to the salon (ladies: apparently the parts you think would hurt the most, in fact, don't - the top is the worst), so enthralled with the beauty of the whole project, and so inclined to dance around her flat like a stripper, that I give her two weeks before she loses her secondary virginity.
And with that prediction, dear readers, I must turn my focus back to the riveting discipline of algebra.
Venerable Anila
Posted by: lucie
Today I sent a care package containing about 20 past issues of The New Yorker and The Economist to an amazing Buddhist nun who lives in Nepal. It feels good to be able to do something nice for a very awesome nun. Especially one who has subtly and unknowingly influenced one of your major life decisions and put your mind at ease about it.
Venerable Anila was the pivot point for my biz school decision. Part of me wanted to go and knew it would be a good opportunity, but like many people I had a rather tough time getting to grips with the idea of business as a potential positive social force. Not to state the obvious, but it does rather tend to work the other way. So I was fairly surprised that when I semi-sheepishly informed this Tibetan Buddhist nun (Tibetan in her Buddhism, that is, American by birth) that I was waiting on a decision about an MBA program I'd applied to, she got genuinely excited. "That's great!" she exclaimed enthusiastically. "We need people with those kinds of skills!"
I was unsure to whom "we" was supposed to refer, or whether I was even one of "we" - Buddhists? People who generally want to do good? - but something about her purely positive response to the idea of an MBA program went a long way in changing my conception of what it could amount to. It gave me a certain peace about the idea, and quite soon after our little chat I realized - not really decided, it wasn't that proactive - that I'd go if I were accepted. When word came, she was more excited for me than anyone else I met that entire month. She very nearly jumped up and down.
Venerable Anila lives in a very simple little house in the Nepali countryside, studying Tibetan texts, meditating and quietly practicing her Buddhism in retreat. She has a degree in education from Harvard and extensive knowledge of physics and math. When she came to Lotus to join us for the one-month course, she had hardly spoken to anyone in three years - just the people who sold vegetables in the nearest village. She speaks fluent Nepali and Tibetan, and an endearingly broken-sounding English, rusty from disuse. "Here I am fine," she'll write in her emails, a perfectly acceptable turn of phrase but not exactly a native-sounding one.
When she came down from the hills to join us in the Kathmandu Valley, the first thing that struck her was our clothes. She'd been living for years with just two sets of robes (you're not allowed to have more than two sets) among neighbors who probably didn't have much more clothing themselves, and she was confronted with all of us, dressed up in our hippie gear or vacationing tax attorney gear or whatever other gear. You'd think she'd have been overwhelmed by our volume and chatter, but it was the clothes that fascinated her most.
Everyone loved Venerable Anila; most of us had difficulty from time to time remembering to refer to her as "venerable," despite the robes. She maintained the code of conduct into which she was ordained, of course, but still fit right in. One of the course leaders admonished all the students one day for forgetting to treat the Sangha with proper respect. "You really shouldn't call Sangha members 'girlfriend' or, for example, hug them," he said, with obvious reference to Venerable Anila, whom everybody loved because she was always smiling, always willing to chat, always happy for everyone. You could hang out with her in the cafe, buy her a coke and talk about anything from Catholicism to Buddha to science. "To Bodhi mind!" she'd say cheerfully, raising a little cola toast.
Despite having lived alone in the Nepali countryside for years, Venerable Anila has not forgotten how laywomen's minds work. She ran into me and James at the guesthouse one morning and I confessed to being smitten with him. Yes, I told a Buddhist nun, "I totally have a crush on that boy." And she replied, "I think you should," then lamented the existence of a rule preventing Sangha members from playing matchmaker. When I emailed two weeks ago to check in with her and make sure she was alright in the midst of all the Nepali mayhem, she brushed it off casually but remembered to ask if I'd had any news from James.
She just rules. It is a privilege to be able to send such a woman a care package. It is a privilege to receive the occasional email from her, when she makes it to an Internet cafe. It's an inspiration to meet someone so amazing, and it's cool to have a nun friend.
First impressions of economics
Posted by: lucie
So I mentioned in a previous entry that I had discovered, much to my surprise, that I love economics. That's only partly true. And let it be declared very early in this entry that the extent of my formal economic knowledge, at least what can be gleaned from books, can be summed up in the words "Complete Idiot's Guide." (Though I've also read two books about high-level political/economic solutions to global poverty, both of which struck me as deeply unrealistic, and one book about microfinance). Hence I wholeheartedly acknowledge the possibility that I am in Modern Jackass territory here. But I'll ramble on nonetheless.
Anyway. Here's the thing that immediately strikes you about economics when you really start to study it in earnest. Dear me, what a messy system we've built, and we've no idea how to control it. And then: they call this a science? Seriously? Economists can't even predict what the economy will do next, and they seem to have to invent a new school of economics every few decades, each with new and improved methods to keep the system from spinning out of control. Not to mention the entirely ridiculous premise of growth and growth and more growth. The business cycle goes round and round and there may be a recession from time to time, but things will always kick back in again because people will always have to buy more clothes, more appliances and more cars. Seriously? This is what we base this on? Economics, or at least what is accepted as economics up to now, looks like a pretty disastrous field, and about as much of a science as psychoanalysis.
I mean, I just go on what they tell me. But you have to admit we don't exactly have control of this thing we've created (did I say "we"?). And that's completely ignoring the fact that what we call 'economics' or 'the global economy' basically ignores 80% of the world. And who's kidding who, even in the US/UK/Western Europe where, by comparison, we're all totally rich, how many people do you know who really understand the economy well enough to play the investment games properly? Whose "economy" is it that university freshman are studying in Microeconomics 101?
On top of all that, economics as we now know it seems to isolate itself from all that is human. It's like all there is to understand is cash flow, means of production, investments, financial markets and GDP. Really very weird, given that most people will never, ever in their lives get to grips with these concepts. I'll take my gripe about philosophy (which I don't think I've actually shared here, but don't worry, we'll get there) and apply it double, triple, ten bazillion times more fiercely to economics: the academic field encompasses just a tiny sliver of what is actually out there. If economics is the study of how people get what they need and want in a world in which tradeoffs are necessary, the academics should look a little further than the standard economic indicators, if you see what I'm saying. Mainstream economics really looks like the study of how wealthy people get what they want and need.
But I did start this out by saying I kind of loved economics, and here's why: it's the infinite possibility of it all. It's the fact that you can define whatever you like as 'an economy,' whether that's a ghetto or a village or the greatest superpower in the world, and there's plenty of room to invent new ones.
"What those people need," an economist/financial analyst friend of mine once declared, referring sweepingly to the entire developing world, "Is a dose of economics." I think I understand what he meant; that they needed a bit more knowledge about how to manage their resources, get the most out of them, whatever. But if you have no cash and no means of production, how exactly is the Western academic model of economics going to help you? It's just a silly premise. What those people need, you start to think, is for "economics" to get a good dose of them.
And one does get the impression that the odd economist is beginning to figure this out. Again, Muhammad Yunus, microfinance. The Western economy has totally backed microfinance - in fact, it's close to being considered a new investment sector. Microfinance is as set of financial tools designed to help people out of poverty, born of the study of the real-life economics of poor people. No one ever thought to invent such tools before because no one realized there was a way to involve poor people in the economy. More pointedly, no one cared. But it turns out that by solving poor people's problems, you get more money circulating and make a buck. So everyone wins, and the global economy was quite happy to welcome microfinance to the party.
Microfinance doesn't work like Western finance models. Most loans are administered to groups of women who back and guarantee each other. It's very cooperative. It's actually finance as women might have created it, because microfinance was created for women. Why? Because the people who started this revolution quickly figured out that if you get money into the hands of women in poor areas, their families will benefit more than if you give it to the men. Sorry guys, but it's been proven in study after study in these countries: women use the money to take care of the kids and community; men tend to spend a lot more of it on themselves. You want to get a village out of poverty, you start by pulling up the women. They'll pull their men and children up with them.
Poor, illiterate women now have an economic model that serves their needs because someone took the time to look at their lives and see what those needs were. And it turns out that this economic model plugs right into the Western moneymaking machine, so everyone's happy. If you can create an economy for poor, illiterate women, if you can create an economy - with its own currency - in Second Life, who can't you create one for? There is so much that could be done.
The idea that you can evaluate and improve economic models anywhere, in any situation, organically, to suit anyone; and they don't have to be strictly capitalist or socialist, they can just be tailored to the people, is pretty cool. People are finding creative solutions. Studying the economics of poor people, not just the economics of Wall Street Journal subscribers, means we can figure out how to make things work for the have nots as well as the haves. The Dow Jones and financial markets and mathematical models that make up most economics courses might not do it for you, but that is exciting stuff.
Reading list - thank you, Bossman
Posted by: lucie
A brief example of Karma in action: apparently Bossman kicked me to the curb early, after I gave my month's notice, because someone had recently waltzed into the paper boasting lovely clips and credentials. When I called it a day he figured he'd cut his losses, fire me early and hire this promising specimen of a reporter. So he abruptly washed his hands of me. This, you may recall, actually made me happy, but it was a rather unprofessional and sleazy move on his part.
Turns out the promising new reporter backed out, leaving him scrambling for freelancers to fill the space. Karma does its thing so quickly sometimes.
In the meantime, I have discovered how little cash I actually require for sustenance, and have read all of the following, in this order, with lots of overlap (often had 3 or 4 on the go at once):
The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching - Thich Nhat Hanh
Closely Watched Trains - Bohumil Hrabal
The Diamond That Cuts Through Illusion: Commentaries on the Prajnaparamita Diamond Sutra - Thich Nhat Hanh
Our Common Interest: An Argument - Commission for Africa
Another Roadside Attraction - Tom Robbins
The Complete Idiot's Guide to MBA Basics - Tom Gorman
Banker to the Poor: Microlending and the Battle Against World Poverty - Muhammad Yunus
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking - Malcolm Gladwell
Myths to Live By - Joseph Campbell
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Economics - Tom Gorman
The End of Poverty: How We Can Make It Happen In Our Lifetime - Jeffrey Sachs
The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers - Will Durant
A few notes on the above:
- Thich Nhat Hanh is a living Buddha and I'm going to be in his presence in just a couple weeks, which boggles my mind.
- Bohumil Hrabal is amazing. I've said it before, I'll say it again - please read him sometime. Closely Observed Trains, I Served the King of England or my very very favorite, Too Loud a Solitude.
- I don't care what anyone says, I'll never get sick of Tom Robbins.
- Tom Gorman is very good at explaining business principles and economics.
- Surprisingly, I think I love economics. More on this later.
- Joseph Campbell is (er, was) the pinnacle of human consciousness. I truly believe this. I may expound on this another time. I also listened to 6 hours' worth of interviews with him conducted in the year before his death and watched a 10-part tv series called Mythos, annoyingly introduced by a totally sappy and condescending Susan Sarandon, but otherwise riveting. Joseph Campbell knew what was what.
- Malcolm Gladwell, gotta love him. It's funny that he's seen as a business guru; I think his ideas reach far beyond the world of business, but I guess that's America for you - how can we use it to make money? His New Yorker articles are also a pleasure to read, and they're all archived at gladwell.com.
- Philosophy is kind of fun in small doses. Will Durant writes beautifully, which saves you from having to read overintellectualized nonsense. Thumbs up.
- I don't think Jeffrey Sachs or the Commission for Africa people, what with their top-down plans, have got it right.
- As previously mentioned, Muhammad Yunus is a genius.
I'm currently reading (all at once):
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference - Malcolm Gladwell
Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered - E.F. Schumacher
The World Is Flat: The Globalized World in the Twenty-First Century - Thomas Friedman
Incidentally, if you're not aware of this, journalists almost universally loathe Thomas Friedman. He's not a very good writer. He gets overexcited about ideas and blurts them out in rather unsystematic, impulsive ways (check out this hilarious review by Matt Taibbi for a taste of what I'm talking about here). For this reason I agree with all of those who loathe him and also consider him a brother. I never really read him in the NYTimes but from what I've heard about "The World Is Flat," he has some of the same overexcited ideas about globalization that I do, so I figured I'd check it out. The sticker on the front says "The bestselling non-fiction book in the world today." Can this possibly be true?
Anyway, I need to hurry up and get through those three, because my little sister arrives next week and is bringing another stack of carefully-ordered used copies of:
How to Change the World : Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas - David Bornstein
The White Man's Burden : Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good - William Easterly
The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else - Hernando de Soto
Capitalism at the Crossroads : The Unlimited Business Opportunities in Solving the World's Most Difficult Problems - Stuart L Hart
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits - C.K. Prahalad
and of course:
The McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Course In Finance for Non-Financial Managers - Robert Cooke (god help me)
Truthfully, I have slacked off pretty hard on the math and need to hit that up in a very serious way. It would not be very cute if I spent all my pre-MBA time reading up on poverty, social entrepreneurism and ways to save the world, and then failed out for want of basic math skills. Reading about changing the world is a lot more inspiring, but math and finance are necessary evils in businessland.
You can learn anything that you can get interested in, a friend of mine likes to say, so I must develop a sincere interest in math and finance. Love the math. Be one with the math. Love the numbers. Love the balance sheets. And anyway, if I can master finance, saving the world should be a breeze in comparison.
ps. If anyone would like any info/review/synopsis/opinion on any of the above-mentioned read books in particular, holla.
Who is lucie?
Posted by: lucie
Been thinking about this Lucie character I've been portraying on the web for a year now, and exactly how far we're going to be able to go together.
Oh, Lucie. You rant shamelessly about boys, you go on stupid holidays, you make veiled references to the general vicinity in which you live but never get too specific for fear that someone who knows your real life alter-ego will find you; you hide behind a fake name and tell unveiled stories of picking up boys at Mensa conferences. It's a cute little routine. This blog has provided a medium for every completely unconsidered, unselfconscious expression of every dumb thought that comes into your silly head. And hopefully people can relate to your stupid Lucie-ness because you just act like the ass that you are - the ass we all normally have to pretend we're not.
(Wow, I'm typing to my blog-self in the second person. Is that as narcissistic as referring to oneself in the third person?)
Here's the thing, dear readers: there's a trade-off. I can be really honest here about a lot of things - namely, my emotions and obsessive thoughts - but I have to hide a lot of others - like where I actually live or work or will be going to school in September. And there's another problem - I'd kind of like to start using the blog for slightly more serious things. Like networking with people who are trying to make a difference in the world, and expressing thoughts and opinions about things that actually matter - unlike most of the thoughts in my stupid head that I share here.
I mean, I really do let my stupid obsessive head go wild here, and that's fine, and I do hope it's sometimes amusing and entertaining and/or makes another girl occasionally feel like she has the market on the crazy slightly less cornered. But it also paints me into a corner in some ways. Because despite how I may come off here, I actually think about a lot of important things that matter. The trouble is, I'm not sure that those things can comfortable share a space with entries like 'omg Tom and I got really drunk and there was all this drama about the symbolism of the ring I gave him!' etc. And to be very frank, there's a reason I write that stuff here. It's because I don't want just anybody to know that my silly head works that way. For example, potential employers or other aspiring social entrepreneurs or uh, you know, anyone in the real world who isn't one of my closest girlfriends (or a very select few guys friends), to be honest.
It's tricky. Trust me, give yourself a space where no one knows who you actually are, and your silliest most obsessive thoughts will express themselves very freely, and that's great. It feels good. But it's not your whole self. It's just your inner dumb teenager. Giving your inner stupid teenager a blog and discovering that some people find her endearing (though you can tell, you can just feel, that some people disdain her), is totally liberating. But it's also restrictive. Anonymity doesn't bring out the best, necessarily - it just allows expressions to the dimensions of oneself that aren't normally allowed to be free.
Here's what I'm trying to say: I'm considering killing Lucie. Or maybe... splitting her personality, but that would be a secret just between us. Because I'd really like to blog about things that are a little bit more serious than, like, how drunk I got in Dublin. And I can certainly do that here, but it's just not what I've set myself up for. Furthermore, Lucie isn't my real name and I may want to actually use my ramblings to connect with other real-world people. Well, other real-world people aren't supposed to get to know all the stuff I write about here. This isn't stuff you tell your colleagues or fellow students, you know? This is, ironically, "private."
I'm thinking about coming out of the blogging closet. Things that would be great about that: I could share my flickr photostream and my del.icio.us links and actual location and school and such, not to mention my real name. I could tell my family and real life friends about my blog, which I have henceforth not done. They'd like that. I could specialize a bit and have a blog that's actually about something besides my mundane little life and ridiculous brain which, to be honest, I get kind of sick of sometimes. I mean, does that part of my brain really need to be encouraged by having this alter-ego who's all about blathering on and on about whatever is in her head?
In truth, dear readers, the girl behind the real life Lucie really needs to work on being less familiar with everyone she meets, and this blog only encourages her to be moreso. Jeesh, I'm going to be 30 soon. At some point I need to learn that if I want to be effective in this world, as cute as I think my candor may be, it isn't how the adult world works. So maybe Lucie is bad for my development.
I don't know. Maybe I could keep her, and she could be our little secret. Maybe I could go back through past entries, delete EVERY reference to location and academic plans, move her to California and really water her down and make Lucie a purely emotional entity, and then I could have two blogs. But somehow that seems like it would lead to conflict, not to mention discovery.
So I seek advice now, dear readers, and clearly I'm only writing this to serious UrHo regulars or people who follow this blog closely. Do I kill her off and start afresh as my real self? Do I split my personality and leave Lucie intact so as to allow my inner teenager a stage for her drama queen tendencies, trusting any regular readers and the UrHo family to keep this secret? Is Lucie a secret we could keep? Does anyone even care, or is my head really far up my own ass?
Comments welcome, even begged-for, for the life of this entry. I give it 24 hours before it self-destructs. Opinions and guidance truly welcome here.
Happy birthday to us
Posted by: lucie
Good God, it's our bloggiversary. One year today, friends! One year ago today was the debut of Overarching, a blog that had no idea why it was being born and still has no idea why it exists. Thus far we have tried cutesy feature writing, rehashes of time in rehab, rehashes of time in Buddhist brainwashing programs, writing about sex, railing about changing the world and lots of little obsessions in between. Next we'll try business school, and then... then, who knows?
Social entrepreneurship and changing the world?
Opening a soup restaurant?
Getting married and settling down with 2.2 kids and a mortgage and 2 cars?
Moving to Africa to listen to lots of badass drumming?
Time will tell.
In the meantime, thanks to all the people who have commented over the past year - it's always fun to see confirmation that actual people, for whatever reason, read this thing. Apologies for the times when I get too far up my own ass or too obsessed with topics no one else finds interesting. And thanks to The Mikey Mike and the rest of the Urbanhonking crew for giving me this space, for reasons I've still yet to grasp (and I hope they don't regret it).
I just went to my photos to try and find an interesting visual tidbit to give as a sort of reverse birthday present, and in the process I realized what a year it had been. What a year. It began with a broken heart in the North of England and ends in Eastern Europe. In between, a couple lovers (one of whom radically changed my idea of what 'good lover' actually meant), a handful of crushes, a heart stretched far enough to learn a few lessons, one public sector job, one journalism job, one dishonorable discharge, an awkward cradle-robbing hookup in a Kathmandu hotel room (edited from these pages for fear aforementioned cradle occupant might happen upon them), a sketchy Buddhist retreat, a future husband of questionable orientation, a visit to the States, one to Rome, one to Dublin, one to Edinburgh, one naked romp through Newcastle, one bungee jump, one weekend dodging flaming barrels of tar in Devon... I've woken up with my head in a toilet bowl, flown across vast bodies of water, seen Rufus Wainwright in concert, met some of the most amazing people in the world, discovered the Colbert Report (!), laid eyes on Stonehenge, opened my mind in ways I never thought possible... what kind of lucky bitch gets to live a life like this?
Such a life. Such adventures. What began as a perfunctory entry to mark one year of blogging has, in the time it's taken me to type this drivel (and I type quickly), brought me nearly to tears. It's amazing how much you can learn and experience and grow in a year, or two, or nearly thirty. It hasn't all been roses, but I think if someone offered me the chance I'd live this year over and over and over until the end of time.
So on my first blog birthday, I make just this one wish: to find some way to give back to the world. I've already had far more than my share of it, and it's high time we turned the tables.
In a token display of reverse birthday present love, Lucie and Overarching present to you: cute pictures of animals. Best wishes and thanks from, uh, us.
Banker to the Poor
Posted by: lucie
Unless you have, at some point, entertained grand, idealist visions of changing the world, you may not have heard about Muhammad Yunus's Banker to the Poor, or put it on your wishlist. Well, whatever your priorities, I'm telling you - this is one of the most exciting, inspiring books you'll ever read. I tore through the entire 250+ page thing today and I'm breathless.
Okay, here's one big problem with the world (among many): people at the top think they're so damn smart. They're right - they are smart. That's how they got to the top. Unfortunately they're often so impressed with themselves that they forget how the experience and simple observations and wisdom of the people at the bottom can illuminate things. Hence the distance between the two starts to look insurmountable. The entire organizational model we take for granted - hierarchy, bureaucracy, top-down planning - is desperately ineffective. The people running things just don't know what's actually going on in the world.
Being a reporter for a short while, even a totally amateuristic reporter at an even more amateuristic publication in Eastern Europe, is a great way to discover how fragmented your perspective really is. And of course, how disconnected the ideas of politicians, NGO leaders, company executives and academics are from the reality of everyday people. Over and over you go to report a story and you talk to the politicians who've written the new plan for change, then the academics who say it won't work, and why, then the people whose lives are supposed to be changed who inevitably tell you it in no way addresses their real concerns. Journalists should run the world, as far as I'm concerned. Well maybe not, but the people who do run the world should take a hint or two from journalists about how to get the whole story before they start making plans.
Anyway, so here's a book about a guy who went and got a PhD in Economics and could therefore explain, with his economic theory, exactly why poverty existed and what would have to be done to get rid of it - macroeconomic models for raising GDP and everything else working itself out, and so on. He gets it. He has a PhD in economics. From an American university. He's an economics professor teaching at a university in Bangladesh. He knows how things should work. Except... people outside are starving to death in the streets, and none of his theories seem to be making it stop.
"Nothing in the economic theories I taught reflected the life around me. How could I go on telling my students make-believe stories in the name of economics? I wanted to become a fugitive from academic life. I needed to run away from these theories and from my textbooks and discover the real-life economics of a poor person's existence."
So one day he starts poking around in a nearby village, talking to actual human beings. He meets women who have to borrow money from moneylenders every day to buy the bamboo they need to make stools - 22 cents a day. Because of a tough lending arrangement, they end up seeing only 2 cents per day of their profits. Yunus does some research in the village and ultimately discovers that if he loaned 42 women in the village $27 to buy the raw materials they needed - not $27 each, but $27 for all 42 dependent on such unprofitable arrangements - they would be able to start lifting themselves out of poverty.
This is the beginning of Grameen Bank, which goes on to pioneer microcredit and provide over 3.8 billion dollars in tiny loans to 2.4 million families worldwide.
The book is a beautiful account of the way Grameen's business model developed. Want to help people? Quit theorizing and try talking to some actual people. Human beings are complicated creatures. No theory is so airtight, no matter how carefully you think it through, no matter how genius it may seem, that it will survive the acid test of being exposed to ordinary humans in all their illogical glory.
Social entrepreneurship
Posted by: lucie
Turns out there's a name for people who want to apply their natural inclinations to harness market forces in order to change the world: social entrepreneurs. Hey, who knew? There's a category to slot into, a label to stick on oneself. It's rather comforting, though the irony is of course not to be overlooked.
Funny thing about searching for big ideas to change the world: you think and think and think a bit harder about the state of things, squeeze out some possibly epic idea, collapse in exhaustion and lie in bed wondering hang on a second - did I just reinvent (and not in the good way, like 'recreate and make better' but in the 'reinvent the wheel' way) Fair Trade? Or was I onto something slightly more unique than that? Will have to research. Of course the next day you think up some new phrases to google and find that you're not the first one to have the general idea, though you may have a unique edge, but unlike normal entrepreneurship, where this should make you sad, you are heartened. You think brilliant - like all good ideas, someone has thought of it before. This is a good start.
James and I had a lengthy chat in the courtyard of the guesthouse in Nepal about the need to find a worthwhile idea. I told him I knew I'd have my own business again someday; it's just who I am. I don't think that makes me clever or anything; it's simply the result of the genetics and experiences and other mental factors that have added up, through the years, to this thing I call myself. The question is simply, and has always been, what business is worth starting. I have a bad habit of coming up with business ideas and telling them to my friends, who then believe me - and not just believe, but get excited and actually ask if they can work for me. Even when the idea is basically stupid, if I'm being honest. I'm very convincing. "Just think what you could do if you applied those abilities to something that could make a difference," he said, and I said yes, this is the conclusion I've come to, BUT WHAT?
Well, I'm working on that question and I've got some ideas, but this time I'm keeping them mostly to myself for two reasons. First, they sound incredibly naive and idealistic. That's fine. If you want to change the world, you'd damn well better start with a naive and idealistic premise. But most people aren't such ridiculous optimists, nor happy with thier own life's missions, so they tend to react negatively.
The second risk is more significant: that they will believe you, and call your naive, idealistic, nascent ideas genius when in fact you really need people to play devil's advocate to help you think them through. People are pretty easily taken in by an exciting idea, and some of us have a natural ability - again, for better or worse, it just is what it is - to make an idea sound more exciting than it probably actually is. One time I convinced my ex boyfriend we should open a takeout soup restaurant, merely as an illustration of how easy it is to just come up with a business, any business, and obsess on it hard enough to make it work. I laid out a business vision about how it would work and where it would be located and how delicious the soup would be and why people would love to eat it for lunch, and I swear he could see the steamy windows and smell the chicken noodle and believed we were really going to do it.
When you're trying to work a naive, idealistic vision into something executable, the last thing you need is someone telling you it's a genius plan and you've figured it all out.
James is thinking about similar issues these days, so we've been tossing this back and forth by email. It began with exploring the ego implications of changing the world, as noted in my last (goodness, it's been a few days now) post. Well, I'm happy to report that he's settled this one. I hesitate to quote emails from people who don't even know this blog exists, but given that he answered all my previously-posted doubts, I'm going to make an exception... just in case anyone cared. It was a long, philosophical email that explored many points and ended with this:
"The world needs positive efforts in countless areas, and if you see that, you must act. As for our personal ego needs, it's undeniable that we get a positive emotional reaction from conceiving of ourselves as altruistic and helpful. That's fine, that's nature's way of providing us with a response mechanism toward living in moral harmony with our fellows. As long as we don't feel a personal ego inflation based on some new self description as minor saintly figures who are different and better than others, then we are OK. Again, it is not about the individual. The social body as a mechanism has to produce those whose altruistic drive is stronger than the norm in order for the system to survive. Thus we all fulfill our place in a system that is bigger than us."
Well, you've done it, I wrote him back - you've put it in its place. Now we have a foundation on which to build an idea for changing the world.
Changing the world
Posted by: lucie
Been thinking I need to examine my premise on this whole 'change the world' thing before I get too ahead of myself with ideas about how to affect said change. That it is the only thing to do with one's meaningless little life still seems self-evident. But that doesn't make the why of it inherent. Without the proper motivation, attempting to change the world - even for the highest good, even with the noblest of goals - could be the ultimate vanity project. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Bono and Bob Geldof.
Know what I'm saying? Both golden-hearted men, I'm sure, and both with the best of intentions, but let's face it - how many more rockstar messiahs does the world really need? Who are these people to decide what the world needs? Who am I to even begin to venture guesses? What do we know of the world?
The world changes itself, with or without lofty mouthpieces shouting from the hilltops about their revolutions. It's not our right to change the world in whatever way makes us feel important or clever; it is our obligation to tune into what is actually happening in the world, to recognize the ways in which the world is attempting to change itself, and to help it along.
Without humility, a great idea quickly becomes an overblown macrocosm of one's own world view. Cf Freud, that crazy bastard. You know, Freud only ever spent like 3 weeks working in a psychiatric clinic. Seriously, and that was only as a stepping stone to some fellowship he was trying to get his hands on. All of his epic ideas about the unconscious - and they were epic, mind you, and he did change the world - were gleaned from interactions with mildly neurotic rich white people. Jung was the one who actually spent years working with psychotic patients and seeing how far the continuum of sanity/mental health really reached. Okay, maybe Jung spent a little too much time with the psychotics, because a lot of people think he was a crazy motherfucker. But he also changed the world. Still, neither of them was entirely right.
People who get it right are quiet geniuses like Erich Fromm, who came along a bit later with a multidisciplinary approach, pulled in Zen and philosophy and sociology and crafted theories of psychoanalysis that could truly be applied to the overarching(!) human experience. I find it deliciously ironic that moderation, in the end, is the real key to truth. If I may digress a moment, I am tempted to label this Great Spiritual Lesson Number Three in my life (cf 1&2). Moderation. It's the ultimate in simplicity, but you have to go to the ends of the earth and overcomplicate everything in a million different ways, a million different times, before you can deeply grasp it. I'm still doing that (as if this weren't painfully obvious), but I think I can see the light, and I think it's not a bonfire but a warm, centered glow. It's kind of funny.
Anyway, you may have heard of Erich Fromm, but most people probably haven't. That's because moderation doesn't appear to be that exciting. But when it is born of intensity it is pretty damned effective and powerful.
So to go back to the thought I'm trying really hard to formulate: Changing the world can't be a vanity project. If all the people who said they wanted to change the world were truly sincere about applying themselves where they would be most useful, let's face it - 20,000 people wouldn't have died yesterday of extreme poverty (as they do every day). The problem is that the kind of people who want to change the world tend to be big-headed, arrogant bastards (like me) who see it as the ultimate project. The ultimate Something To Do. It is, that's true. And it's good that big-headed, arrogant bastards like me exist and think this way, because we could otherwise be putting our energy into dominating the stock market, or creating the next big boy band, or making people feel inadequate so they'll buy things they don't need. Or we could just be sitting around numbing our brains with MTV or, uh, Nascar (or similar). Still, if we're to do anything good, it seems we will need to humble ourselves in two major ways.
1) Get out into the world, for god's sake - that world we are talking about changing - and get a very genuine, sincere feel for what it needs, because what it doesn't need is to be recreated in some crazy bastard's image. The world actually knows what it needs and attempts to tell us in a multitude of ways; we have only to listen to the world and help it balance itself (the talking cure?). Unfortunately we live in a society of distractions and self-absorbed insecurities, so we seldom remember to do so. Our attention needs to be properly focused.
2) Admit to ourselves that we may not be the voice of our generation, write the book of our generation, or even come up with the grandest strategy of our generation - that we may do the most good by staying on the ground, remaining on the front line, and actually putting a piece of the plan into action. Though I have to hint here that I think there's something to be said for creating a new organizational model - one that allows more people to be on more front lines at the same time, rather than working in a bureaucratic hierarchy that sucks the good will right out of them. But that's a rant for another time.
Does the world need another middle-aged, middle class white boy from North America with a PhD in economics telling us how to save Africa? I won't say no, but I'd submit that it could benefit lot more from an African guy with a PhD in economics, or at the very least, at the least, more middle-aged white guys who go see how the world actually works before holing themselves up in their academic institutions to formulate grand intellectual plans to remake the world of politics, economics, or whatever else they're talking about remaking these days.
There's an overconcentration of theory and education in America and Europe and an overconcentration of grim, heartbreaking, soul-crushing, overwhelming reality in the third world. The two desperately need to get to know each other. You can't help a world you don't know.
