...on boston

i have been sitting infront of my computer with this "write a new blog post" window up for a while. i can't stop thinking that we are living in the weirdest of times.

back in 2011, i attended the nyc marathon to watch friends run by as they see their dreams of defeating the 26 mile run come true. i hung out around mile 18 - 20, right before the runners go into central park, knowing they are so close. although many people look tired and worn out, you can tell they are excited to reach the end, throw on their comfy shoes and walk out of the park with their medals around their necks. what also amazes me are the people who encourage the runners. some people spend all day outside, in any kind of weather (in 2011, it was cold), and yell. people come and go as they wait to see their loved ones run by or others spend the whole day yelling and encouraging people they don't know. but everyone takes the time to yell and clap. if they see the name of the person on their bib then they call them out by name. sometimes they just hand out random high-5's. sometimes they just clap and smile. sometimes they even hold up funny posters (one guy had a sign that said, "a beer is near!"). these people who stand and watch, who encourage strangers and friends, amaze me.

what should have been a great moment of joy for people in boston was violated yesterday. and i just can't understand it all. grumpy cat said it best, 

but then i think,

because i really don't want to hate this world. i want to remember everything that i love that's in it, all of the people, the places, the things that we experience. as all of these things happen around us, i just don't want to forget that there really is good in the world and there are things to love about it, even in dark times. 

...on death

click for more pics

last friday, which also happened to be good friday, a friend of mine passed away. as someone who has lost her own father and both grandfathers, death is shocking but losing a friend is shocking. not that his death was a total surprise - he had been sick for 2 years and we all knew what the outcome would be. but to lose someone who was only one year older than you, someone who was so full of life and had so much more life to live is shocking.

the eulogy, which was delivered by his best friend (and friend of mine), was truly honest, personal and emotional. i'm pretty sure there wasn't a single dry eye in the house. but, i was personally struck by the final part of his speech when he talked about what he regretted most. what i thought my friend would say was that he regretted not telling our friend how much he loved him. i was wrong. what followed was an amazing reminder. my friend went on to say that what he regretted was not saying thank you.

since my father's passing, i vowed that i would make sure that the people i love know that i love them. although that seemed like enough, i don't think it is. saying thank you to our friends (and family) for their years of friendship, for the things we have learned from them, for the support and guidance, is much more specific than i love you. and we often forget to say these things to the people that we surround ourselves with because we're way too busy working, paying bills, drinking, chasing our dreams, etc. and probably more because we take for granted that certain people are in our lives in the first place.  

i have surrounded myself with some of the most amazing people in this world. they are some of the most selfless, ambitious, smart, innovative, supportive, thoughtful people. i like to think that they are like that because i am like that, but really it's because i hope to be more like that every single day. they are truly inspiring people. and that's what i am most thankful for when it comes to their friendship.

one final thank you:

to paulo, who lived his life everyday to the fullest. i am so thankful to have known someone as crazy and funny as you, and that i was able to call you a friend.

repost - how to live forever and other lessons

i originally saw this when my sis forwarded mac's repost of it over on her blog. i'm also reposting because it's always great to share.

To the Attendees at Dick Strong's January Symposium in Vail

Here are some of the lessons I have learned in my first 80 years. I hope to continue to practice them in the next 80.

1. Concentrate on finding a big idea that will make an impact on the people you want to influence. The Ten Surprises which I started doing in 1986 has been a defining product. People all over the world are aware of it and identify me with it. What they seem to like about it is that I put myself at risk by going on record with these events which I believe are probable and hold myself accountable at year-end. If you want to be successful and live a long, stimulating life, keep yourself at risk intellectually all the time.

2. Network intensely. Luck plays a big role in life and there is no better way to increase your luck than by knowing as many people as possible. Nurture your network by sending articles, books and emails to people to show you're thinking about them. Write op-eds and thought pieces for major publications. Organize discussion groups to bring your thoughtful friends together.

3. Get enough sleep. Seven hours will do until you're sixty, eight from sixty to seventy, nine thereafter which might include eight hours at night and a one hour afternoon nap.

4. Evolve. Try to think of your life in phases so you can avoid a burn-out. Do the numbers crunching in the early phase of your career. Try developing concepts later on. Stay at risk throughout the process.

5. Travel extensively. Try to get everywhere before you wear out. Attempt to meet local interesting people where you travel and keep in contact with them throughout your life. See them when you return to a place.

6. When meeting someone new, try to find out what formative experience occurred in their lives before they were seventeen. It is my belief that some important event in everyone's youth has an influence on everything that occurs afterwards.

7. On philanthropy my approach is to try to relieve pain rather than spread joy. Music, theatre and art museums have many affluent supporters, give the best parties and it can add to your social luster in a community. They don't need you. Social service, hospitals and educational institutions can make the world a better place and help the disadvantaged make their way toward the American dream.

8. Younger people are naturally insecure and tend to overplay their accomplishments. Most people don't become comfortable with who they are until they're in their 40's. By that time they can underplay their achievements and become a nicer more likeable person. Try to get to that point as soon as you can.

9. Take the time to pat those who work for you on the back when they do good work. Most people are so focused on the next challenge that they fail to thank the people who support them. It is important to do this. It motivates and inspires people and encourages them to perform at a higher level.

10. When someone extends a kindness to you write them a hand-written note, not an e-mail. Handwritten notes make an impact and are not quickly forgotten.

11. At the beginning of every year think of ways you can do your job better than you have ever done it before. Write it down and look at what you have set out for yourself when the year is over.

12. Never retire. If you work forever, you can live forever. I know there is an abundance of biological evidence against this, but I'm going with this theory anyway.

woooosah

this is my woosah face.

the first week of my 2nd (and last) semester is done for me and i am already looking at my schedule and thinking, "what the hell was i thinking?!?" last semester was a great success and i was able to juggle all 4 of my classes, but this semester i decided to take 2 modules (half semester classes), 2 full semester classes and an independent study. because...well, when graduate school is only for a year and every class sounds amazing and you want to work with many different professors, you make it work. 

some pluses about my classes:

the readings are all amazing. so what if i have to read entire books and articles every single week? they are definitely interesting.

i'm in a writing workshop class where i get to write personal essays. this has me thinking i want to write a whole book of personal essays.

my professors are all amazing. i feel like i am in the presence of superstars and i'm hoping their awesomeness rubs off on me.

my friends are in my classes! and they are the smartest people i know here so you can only imagine how amazing my study groups are.

i only have class on tuesdays and wednesdays. but that doesn't mean i slack off the rest of the week. looking for a job after this place, meetings, reading and writing takes over. it's intense.

xoxo,

dtm

pep talk

if you haven't seen this video yet, then you're missing out:

since the day someone posted it on my fb wall, i have watched it every...single...morning...it's a great reminder of what we are all here to do - "create something that makes the world awesome." 

there are so many quotables in this one little clip. i just can't get over it.

enjoy!

quote

"...not only have i always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but i remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters." 

- joan didion

preach on, sista.

1 second everyday...for two weeks

enjoy!

new year, new projects

happy 2013!

i've been back at school for 2 weeks now taking an intense, but exciting, class. it's so weird to think that in a few short months i will be all done here and starting some brand new adventures. i really want to enjoy this experience as much as i can so i am trying to document this year in multiple ways:

this 1 second everyday app is amazing. so far i have one second clips from every single day since i purchased it and am looking forward to seeing my entire school year play out in a video. the above video is just my first week, but i hope to create compilations per week plus more. i'll be posting them on my youtube channel for you to check out.

attempting to do the 365 day photo challenge. funny enough, it has made me take a lot more pictures during the day. AND - i think i am becoming better at taking pics! 

and finally, i am keeping another paulo coelho journal for the year. it's so therapeutic. i didn't quite finish the one i had for last year so i vow to be better this year.

awesome

via

a reminder for myself.

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school update

i get a TON of questions about school and i am always unsure of how to answer them. i typically like to be honest with my answers but i also don't want people to think that i am ungrateful for this opportunity that i have been granted. don't get me wrong - i feel fortunate and lucky for this experience.

so here are the answers to those questions i get so often in no particular order:

how's school? it's good. i am enjoying the classes, for the most part, and have learned some interesting things. are there classes i wish i hadn't taken? hell yes. but i just need to remember it's one year of my life so whatever classes i am taking, i need to accept.

is harvard hard? look, are all elite schools hard? not always. yes, there is a buttload of reading and writing i need to do all of the time but, i am convinced, that the only way to fail a class here is to not do a damn thing. as long as you're keeping up with the reading and writing, it's fine.

how do you like boston? HATED IT (cue men on film). boston is the worst place. it's cold, grey all the time, confusing. i miss ny and boston will never ever be home.

are you really smart? this is such a silly question. i'm probably as smart as the next guy so i can't go around bragging about my smarts. yes, there is a level of smartness and skill that goes into being admitted to a place like harvard BUT it's not rocket science. it takes a well-written essay, great references and some luck.

so i leave you off here - with pics from instagram of the times when i was working damn hard on something at school. arg.

2013

2013. i like the sound of that.

here's to:

* completing graduate school

* writing everyday (like i was supposed to in 2012)

* crocheting. and hopefully making money off of crocheting

* staying awesome

* showing the people that i love how much i love them

* recognizing that everyday is a new opportunity to start fresh

* being confident in myself

i have some resolutions, but i'll keep them to myself right now. no need to go around preaching about how i'm going to do xyz and then complaining about how i've failed after a few weeks. if i keep them to myself, maybe i will be better about keeping them for myself.

quote

"...a breakthrough is part of both the past it came from and the future it starts, in the same way that a bend in the road serves as the end of one direction and the beginning of another. You can stand at the bend and look back to where the road came from and then turn to see where it goes. But if you stand elsewhere on the road, you see either a straight line that ends at the bend or a straight line that began at the same bend. Only at the point of breakthrough can you see both directions at once."

 - Strategic intuition by William Duggan

the best of...

i'm home but working on finals so i can't exactly do a proper update. just thought i'd do a best of this semester from my instagram account.

so in no particular order, here they are:

 hurricane sandy at ihop

 the library is so spectacular

 reading period hot chocolate and work

 from this past weekend - fancy weddings call for fancy attire

 first night in boston, great subway art

 staircase where i live

 it's official!

 grinding

 cool chair at the ed school library

 os gemeos and DTM in boston

 you don't even want to know what this tastes like

 another library shot

and finally - my arrival at school!

only 3 more assignments and evals to finish up before i can officially say bye to my first semester. can't believe there's only j-term and spring left. where did the time go??

belated halloween

if you know anything about me, then you would know that

i love halloween.

i love dressing up, i love hanging out, i love being creative and doing makeup, and i love having fun. it has been a tradition for the boo and i to also hang out and celebrate halloween together which is probably why i love it even more. this year was certainly no different.

i had 2 awesome group costumes this year. 

first up:

 the spice girls.

yes, i am scary spice.

yes, the boo is animal. and yes, i am keeping the hat.

next up:

where's dtm? ok, it's really where's waldo but can you spot me in these pics?

Service is not...

i really love this:

Service is not the same as helping. Helping is based on inequality, it's not a relationship between equals. When you help, you use your own strength to help someone with less strength. It's a one up, one down relationship, and people feel this inequality. When we help, we may inadvertently take away more than we give, diminishing the person's sense of self-worth and self-esteem… Serving is also different to fixing. We fix broken pipes; we don't fix people. When I set about fixing another person, it's because I see them as broken. Fixing is a form of judgment that separates us from one another; it creates a distance. So fundamentally, helping, fixing and serving are ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak; when you fix, you see life as broken; and when you serve, you see life as whole. When we serve in this way, we understand that this person's suffering is also my suffering, that their joy is also my joy… We may help or fix many things in our lives, but when we serve, we are always in the service of wholeness.

Rachel Remen, mid-20^th century

re: last weekend

the bff visited me over the weekend and it was nice to have a little bit of ny here. 

we basically:

drank from this giant bowl on friday night.

took a DTM tour of campus and found this building, which is the same name as a friend of ours.

drank hot chocolate at burdick's. twice.

checked out some really old cemeteries. 

watched this tour group on segways (it was weird).

after she left, i needed to get some work done so i headed to the largest library on campus (the 2nd largest in the USA):

before i went on a haunted tour of campus.

spooky....

weather

i hate this weather. i hate how it rains one second and is sunny the next. i hate how suddenly it's cold. i hate how grey it is most days and that the sun only shines about one day out of the week. i thought NY was bad, but this is torture for people with seasonal depression (not saying that is me but it's just a thought).

and yes, that is a picture of a puddle that i took. for class.

brilliant

in one of my classes this week, we were asked to write about our favorite k-12th grade teacher. 

my mind went blank, before briefly thinking about a college professor that i really loved. i then remembered that the TA asked us to write about a teacher during our k-12th grade years. so i thought about my public school teachers but i couldn't really think about the specifics she was asking us to describe so that seemed like a bust. middle school was ok, but my feeling of being unsuccessful in school doesn't bring up warm and friendly memories of teachers. i was all over the place in high school...but then it hit me.

i took an african-american literature class in high school with a teacher that i had heard a lot about and hoped to take a class with. most students seemed really transformed by his classes and raved about him. being a shy student, he scared the shit out of me but i knew him and he knew me because my sister had taken several classes with him. small school settings make it hard to hide.

he was a burly man with a big pot belly and a lot of facial hair who always wore a flannel shirt, jeans and hiking boots. he looked like he was straight out of the woods. in reality, he was straight out of the woods - he actually lived in a log cabin in the woods somewhere by himself with no tv or phone. (i might be making part of that up, although i am 75% sure i am right about 100% of what's in that sentence). i always imagined him in the woods with all of his books, observing nature and smoking cigarettes. he was obvious about his love of teaching, literature and smoking. he never hid that from his students. it honestly felt like there wasn't a lot he would hide from us.

i can't tell you all of the books we read or the assignments he had us complete but i can tell you that something happened in that classroom which i had never experienced before in a class at this school. he was the first teacher who sat down in the circle with us. he was actually listening to us and we all knew by the way he leaned his body towards the person who was speaking. he told us about his own experiences when he lived in predominately black neighborhoods (harlem, to be exact) and how they related to the texts. here was this white man relating to all of the students in his class. all of us. in an environment that wasn't very diverse, this was the first class where i actually felt diversity. he taught the class without skipping any chapters or telling us that sections weren't important (i swear to you that happened earlier in hs when we read "invisible man" - my teacher told us that one of the chapters wasn't important so we can skip it but i read it and used it in a paper i wrote for that class. BOOM!). but he was the kind of teacher i wish i had taken earlier in my hs career and every year after that. 

i recognized then, and i see more clearly now, that things aren't always as they seem. 

as an adult and someone who works in education, i recognize now that he probably did hide things from us. it's almost impossible to not hide something because there are things that young people should not know about their teachers and that's completely ok.

he once told us in class that seriously brilliant artists are also the most fucked up people in the world. i believed him then but believing him also confused me. to me (and many others), he was so brilliant. but also a strange and isolated man. i wondered, and still wonder, if there was more to his story than we could have known.

in 2006, he passed away not knowing the impact he made on me and still such a mystery in my mind.

i've been thinking about him and this and more all week. i even dug up a blog post a classmate wrote about him after he passed away. at the end of class on tuesday our teacher said, "you should all think about emailing the teacher you wrote about to say thank you." i wish i had taken that opportunity back in the day when he was still alive. even with all of the mystery that surrounds his memory for me, i am grateful i had the opportunity to learn from him and get to know the brilliant, strange teacher i had always observed from a distance. 

wherever he is now, in whatever other worldly place we go to when we pass away, i want to say thank you.

wonderful ideas?

one of my favorite graduate classes is called "the having of wonderful ideas" but it's probably one of the hardest classes to explain to people. it sounds like a real hippie type of class but it has to be the class where i feel the most inspired! i'm clearly drinking whatever lemonade the professor is serving up in class.

the quick and dirty of the class is this:

we spend every week learning how to follow people's thinking in order to help them learn more about a given thing/topic/new idea. this class consists of demonstrations during class time that inform the fieldwork (aka - experiments) that we do on other people, fieldwork reports, small group sections where we talk about the ideas together, weekly journaling to think deeply about what we are learning, lots of readings and a moon journal. yes, i said a moon journal.

because moon journaling seems to intrigue people the most, i will say that the general idea is to (almost) daily write down any observations we have of the moon. we are not allowed to look up anything about the moon though. through our observations, we should be coming up with questions and ideas about the moon. when we discuss it in class and section, i love to hear people talk about the emotional and personal connections they have made with the moon and what they are learning. we are all learning different things, which makes us also learn from each other. it's fascinating.

here are my moon journal entries that i keep in a mini moleskin the boo's mother bought me when i left ny:

so if you notice the moon, think of me. add to my observations. i would love to hear about what other people are observing!