boo recommends 2.

Click here for the first installment of "boo recommends."

Developing Your Thesis Before You Write Your Paper
Yeah, I wrote a 5 page paper of gobbledy-gook, mish-mashed nonsense. Then I had the bright idea to turn in this drivel rather than ask for an extension (I'm not an extension-requesting kind of boo). And now I'm paying for my mistake by spending Spring Break rewriting it. Starting with the thesis.

Dinner Parties at Friends' Houses
Food tastes better when you make it with your friends. I would be surprised if this wasn't already scientifically proven.

Vitamins you can drink
So much more fun than swallowing nasty horse pills, and so much more mature than chewing candy in the shape of Fred Flintstone.

liquid love.

a little known fact about me: I like to take pictures of the beverages I drink while I'm studying or spending time with beloveds. I do this for several reasons: I love coffee and tea, I love drinking them with others, and taking pretty pictures of them in cups reminds me of what was going on at the time -- who was sitting across the table from me, what I was reading, who I was creepily checking out, so on and so forth...

Since I have to get a new phone, I will be losing all of these pictures, so I decided to keep them here for a while.
As you can see, there are some differences among them: sometimes i drank tea. sometimes coffee. sometimes americanos. the pictures also represent different places: dc. boston. school. cafes.
But there are also some common themes: sunshine is one. colored mugs is another. deep appreciation for hot beverages and good company is a third (though my shitty camera phone doesn't always capture that one so vividly and though one of the beverages pictured below is iced).

uhh...

I just fell asleep in the shower. no joke.
also: I haven't eaten spinach in 3 days.

in search of glue.

I really want to be sleeping but my brain has been humming for too many hours and now I can't shut it off.

contents of the hum:

I've been putting some pressure on myself these days -- a bit of it is due, and a bit of it is undue--and I guess I'm trying to sort out how to attend to the due parts (the undue will always persist regardless of how much attention I throw its way, and really, I should be focusing on why I put undue pressure on myself, not what that nagging, vague force is compelling me to do).

You see, this program I'm in resembles, in some ways, scattershot pellets shot into a dark night from a well-intentioned rifle (where pellets = my academic courses of study and dark night = my future). This is the nature of interdisciplinarity, and I get that. Not only do I get it, but I also signed up for it and it's a little late in the game to be complaining about it.

However, now in my last semester, I'm craving a way to tie it all together. I want to weave the last four semesters into a pretty french braid. As a useful corollary, it's Week 6 of my classes which means I'm supposed to be thinking about what I want to work on for my final projects. But all I can come up with are loosely linked concepts that I care deeply about and want to cohere into a larger idea that makes my motor rev. (Oh, how I want, so desperately, to rev.)

Here, in no particular order, are the aforementioned half-baked concepts:

• collective action -- the power of mobs
• social capital as a byproduct of virtual activism (in other words, just because we can't always quantify the benefits of online political movements doesn't mean that their effects are moot)
  
• the (un)importance of transparency/authenticity in building trust

In other news, I realized that I am addicted to spinach. see also: caffeine and songs about robots.

boo recommends.

I'm totally aping this idea from McSweeney's, but I think every once in a while I'm going to create a list of recommendations, i.e., things I stumble on and/or have loved long enough to calcify into my daily routine. Perhaps you will find these recommendations helpful, or perhaps you will simply find them fodder for your ongoing campaign to tease me into silence. Either way, I hope you enjoy.


Pre-cubed Tofu
It bears more than a striking resemblance to a foam pit but it saves time. An added bonus: for some reason, tofu in pre-cubed form seems to absorb less of the packaging water which means you don't have to press it before you use it.

Said the Gramophone
Music blogs rarely inspire me. This one does on nearly a daily basis. Things I'm inspired to do: purchase music. listen to music. fall in love. write. walk through a blizzard. try harder.

Red/green felt tip pens
Last semester I was in the CVS pen aisle when I found these old school beauties. What do they grant me? The freedom to mark significant passages and take notes in my school reading without having to use a highlighter (which I hate). Two functions in one! The spork of the writing instrument world.

Scrabulous
Surely many of you are already hep to the beauty of this Facebook application, a.k.a., the only reason I visit Facebook more than once a month. This unassuming game can take many forms: procrastination tool, olive branch, harmless flirting mechanism, acceptably modest forum for above-average vocabulary. As far as I can tell, its only negatives are that it allows ridiculous two-letter words ("ne"? "da"?) and it doesn't automatically kick me out even after I've spent 45 minutes trying to figure out a 6-letter word that ends in "J."

Sisters
If at all possible, try to make yours a twin. But in the event you were conceived at two different times, then aim for yours to be witty and intuitive. Even better if she can call you on your shit when you need it most.

Creative wrapping paper
The wrapping paper industry makes no sense to me. Why would I spend $7 on a roll of pretty paper that will soon lose its cohesive luster? Instead, I try to re-use wrappy things I already own: old magazines, rags, W-2 tax forms, shower curtains (not clear!).

trusting the lipless.

This semester I'm taking a class called Globalization, New Media and Social Activism. Its title reflects the audacious ambition of its syllabus. We're only 3 weeks into it and already, I'm tempted to skim the reading and soothe myself by humming a quaint "It's a Small World" lullaby.

I think part of the reason I've bristled at the reading/in-class discussions is that I wonder why we're discussing these issues as if technology is the panacea to all our ills. The source of my skepticism isn't apathy (did that sound defensive? probably). I actually do care a great deal about the inequities of money and resources and fucking time that exist among the people on this planet. But it seems to me that our goals for improvement are moot without the presence of trust.

So what if new media has produced ways to communicate that we never before imagined? If a Facebook group forms in the woods, and no one is around to join it...

Wait: back to my point about trust. And how to generate that on the Internet. And how to translate that online trust into embodied activism.

By (dis)trust, I don't mean the type of identity-thievery we see in those Citimortgage credit card ads. I mean the type of trust popularized by Robert Putnam’s discussion of social capital.

Definitions of social capital vary widely, but here are a few I've been mulling over as I do my reading for this class.

‘the process by which social actors create and mobilize their network connections within and between organizations to gain access to other social actors’ resources’ (Knoke 1999, p. 18).

‘the web of cooperative relationships between citizens that facilitate resolution of collective action problems’ (Brehm and Rahn 1997, p. 999).

‘features of social organization such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit’ (Putnam 1995, p. 67).

Is activism more/less effective if it is embodied? e.g. are in-person protests more likely to get a response than online petitions? And: does this matter? If an online petition doesn't achieve its desired persuasive outcome (encouraging a congressperson to vote a particular way, expressing displeasure at a new Wal-Mart practice), then has it still succeeded at generating an intangible, unquantifiable amount of trust that can be used for future activism or stored in a giant community bank? (full disclosure of my position: yes).

In order to focus my wayward thoughts in this class, I'm choosing to concentrate on this notion of trust because I think its presence can help to narrow the gap between the virtual and the embodied.

We spend so much time arguing about technology in polarized terms. The object/tool in the argument du jour is either feared or revered. Let's just shoot our load on this one and admit that technology will no more solve all our problems than it will create them.

So: trust: how do we produce it, maintain it, and capitalize on it?

Gender Project

So, here is my project for my gender class.
Unfortunately, I had to take out some of the more interesting bits in order to make it work as a 3 minute digital story.
But you get the idea...