a beautiful song to be sung

A Sikh woman does not apologize for her appearance and everyone learns something

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 00:51:54 +1000

A Sikh woman does not apologize for her appearance and everyone learns something

Photo

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 00:48:29 +1000

"Never open a book with the weather. Avoid prologues. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry..."

Sat, 07 Jul 2012 19:13:56 +1000

“

Never open a book with the weather.
Avoid prologues.
Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said.”
Keep your exclamation points under control!
Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
Same for places and things.
Leave out the parts readers tend to skip.

”

- Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, synthesized by Open Culture – a fine addition to our ongoing collection of writing advice and these timeless tips from history’s greatest writers. (via explore-blog)

storyboard: What Paper Means in Prison Above: A flash drive...

Sun, 24 Jun 2012 20:11:38 +1000

storyboard:

What Paper Means in Prison

_{Above: A flash drive embedded in a copy of “Code of Federal Regulations, Title 12, Banks and Banking.”
This story produced in partnership with The Awl.}

Wolf ripped up most kites and flushed the pieces, but some, especially those received in the exercise yard, he ate.

Wolf, who is 20 years old, knew that even temporary possession of written notes was against the rules, but he shrugged it off as a necessary risk. One such “kite” was an invitation, which read, “Look we cookin … send some kinda meat for your bowl.” It was scrawled across a scrap of notebook paper, folded seven times and passed from one inmate to another via a third. The paper traveled across cellblock C of the prison — Coxsackie Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in the small town of Coxsackie, New York, about a half-hour south of Albany.

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tranqualizer: When eating organic was totally uncool Before...

Sat, 16 Jun 2012 01:09:43 +1000

tranqualizer:

When eating organic was totally uncool

Before hipsters got rooftop gards, my poor, refugee family ate that way because we had to. And we were ashamed

by Pha Lo

To me, the organic food movement has become dizzyingly, surreally chic. Farmers have become rock stars; the most exclusive restaurants name-check them so much you can almost see dirt on the menu. But before organic produce exploded into a $25 billion industry, before city gardening became cool, I grew up in a Hmong refugee community, living the urban organic lifestyle not because it was fashionable, but because we were poor. I couldn’t wait to leave it behind.

I grew up in Del Paso Heights, a mixed-race inner city of Sacramento, Calif. — the kind of neighborhood that had just two grocery stores between endless fast-food and liquor shops, and where we all paid for our groceries with food stamps. It was where we grew organic food and raised chickens in our backyards to survive. And where we did it in secrecy.

Like most Hmong in the United States, our community was from Laos, transplanted here after an alliance with the CIA turned our isolated tribe of farmers into mercenaries — a failed secret war against the Communist Vietnamese that left Hmong as the targets of ethnic cleansing. Lifelong farmers-turned-international refugees, the older generation was ill-prepared to thrive in modern America. They settled into inner cities where many turned to social services as safety nets.

I remember watching grown-ups lose their identities and self-worth, slip into depression and cycles of poverty, illness and suicide. These were clan leaders who once commanded the respect of entire villages, tough guerrilla soldiers trained by the CIA — like my father — and proud providers who had, without writing, committed to memory centuries of the best farming practices. And they were humbled, receiving welfare and food stamps because there was no opportunity then in urban America for their main skill. Still, they farmed in the city for two necessities: food and a wistful connection to the old way of life.

We grew crops in every plot of soil that hinted of fertility — parking lots, front lawns, even inside discarded paint buckets, which made terrific homes for lemongrass and chili peppers. When I was in elementary school, the families in our apartment building worked a farm just outside of Sacramento. Every person, every age, had a job. Meals were planned around what we gathered: We scraped fresh cucumbers, serving them with sugar over ice on hot summer days; we pounded the signature Hmong mix of hand-picked peppers, cilantro, green onions and lime in a mortar and served it as a dip for meat and sticky rice. I remember loving our imperfectly shaped cucumbers because I got to watch each one grow into its own unique shape and thought they all had more character than the “beautiful” ones wrapped in plastic at the grocery store. And I loved mustard greens, which grew in abundance once a year but could be pickled for year-round consumption.

We bartered with each other. We raised chickens in the backyard, letting them out to roam and feeding them by hand. We didn’t have a label for this back then, though now I suppose people call it “free-range,” and it costs more. We slaughtered our own hens, sometimes with rituals honoring the sacrifice of the animal’s life.

With the costs of vegetables offset by our gardens, all the families pitched in to buy a pig or cow from the closest farmer, dividing the meat. This way, we could also afford to buy rice.

But we had to keep our locavore tendencies secret. America’s food rules, which seemed to us to go against nature, left us fearful of punishment. At the time, exactly one person from our clan had attended an American college and became our cultural broker, translating to shamans the world of Western medicine, and to lifelong hunters and fishermen the rules of hunting and fishing. What license was needed for what, how many of what thing could be caught during which season, if you could take fruit from a tree depending on which side of a fence it hung. All of it was too complicated to keep straight, and so it felt safer to keep our food producing regimens to ourselves. I can’t remember how many times my father built, tore down and rebuilt the chicken coop, afraid that neighbors who heard crowing would report us.

“Don’t tell the Americans,” my mother would always say, and, eventually, as I grew into adolescence, I couldn’t agree more. I was afraid of being judged.

My mother sprinkled only fresh-cut grass in her garden, swearing by its ability to grow bigger and tastier vegetables. She often crossed dangerous lanes of traffic to get to a pile of lawn clippings. My sisters and I would jump out of the car to bag the grass, and we did it with the speed of a NASCAR pit crew, terrified of being seen by friends.

The parking lot of our neighborhood Kmart was a regular pickup spot for lawn clippings. In my teens, when merely being accused of shopping at Kmart was an epic embarrassment, you can imagine the horror I felt about being spotted stealing grass from its parking lot. “If anyone sees me, MY LIFE IS OVER!” I’d say. Unfortunately, dramatic teenage declarations of “life being over” didn’t fly in Hmong households, not when there would always be someone around to remind you of the time he narrowly escaped the death camps.

As the adolescent me tried to find her groove, navigating deeper into the treacherous social maze of an American high school, I tried to talk my mother out of picking cilantro and scallions from her garden, cleaning and separating and selling them for 50 cents a bunch at a local Hmong store. It never made her more than $20 a week, but she didn’t care. She was obsessed with the idea of doing something she knew how to do, something that could earn money.

My family searched for new places to grow food while I became increasingly afraid that outsiders would find out we lived in a replica Hmong village, built to resemble what the older generation knew as “home.” Then one day, I was outed by a classmate as a food stamp user as I stood in the collection line to count money for my mother. That was the day that I decided I hated everything about the way we got food — from the paint-bucket chili peppers to the communal pig, cut up in pieces, ready to be bagged and shared. I wanted to run away from this mess. I wanted to be one of the cool kids. I would feed myself like they do.

Now, as an adult, I don’t have a garden. Years after I finished college and was well into the working world, long after credit cards made checks obsolete at the grocery store, I still insisted on writing checks to pay for my brand-name groceries. The defiant child food stamp user in me still needs the validation that comes from putting pen to paper and declaring, in writing, that I earned the right to take this food home.

But who’d know that, just as I finally shed a former life of organic necessity, my mother would be the hip one? Now I go to the market and hear people boasting about the eggs in their backyards, or how much their garden looks like the one on the White House lawn. My best friend, also a former Hmong child gardener, laughs with me about collecting lawn clippings. If only we had had cool recyclable cloth bags with eco-friendly slogans, we joke. If only we could be heroic, claiming to be launching a food revolution. But for us, there was no room to think about glamour. That life just felt backward.

I imagine now how many “I told you so’s” my mother would impart on me if she could grasp the enormousness of today’s food movement: Pesticide-free produce, hand-fed chickens, cuisines boasting minimal ingredients all represent billions of dollars to be made. And, irony of ironies, now people’s food stamps can’t even cover the costs of organic and local produce at our markets.

But I stood recently at a popular farmers’ market in San Francisco, where I now live and where my relatives have a vegetable stall. Surrounded by a flurry of patrons enthusiastic about locally grown food, I felt … proud. Proud that Hmong farmers owned their own stalls, their tradition of necessity now trendy and profitable. That day, my uncle gave me a bag of cucumbers and tomatoes from his stall. He said he had heard all about my schooling and my travels, and that he was proud I had made it. But as I looked at my bag and at all the customers flocking to his stall, I couldn’t help thinking he was making it in his own right.

Pha Lo is a freelance writer/nutrition educator and teaches food budgeting skills to low-income parents.

patrickrhone / journal » Blog Archive » Remembering Rodney

Sat, 16 Jun 2012 00:43:35 +1000

patrickrhone / journal » Blog Archive » Remembering Rodney:

minimalmac:

Every year, on this day, I take some time out to remember my friend Rodney. Rodney committed suicide via a gunshot to the head on June 15th, 2002 after a long struggle with depression. He was a dear friend, Mac fan, and talented writer. I miss him dearly.

Every time Apple releases something incredible or posts record sales, I can’t help but think about how much he would have been enjoying it. That is, as much a depression or the medicines used to treat it allow you to enjoy anything.

Some who know me know that I live with bi-polar disorder (manic depression). I have spoken about it before. I have been hospitalized for attempted suicide myself many years ago.

There is no real cure. After many years of medication and therapy treatment that had varying degrees of success, I now use a combination of mindfulness meditation and non-violent communication to help me navigate through it. It has been the most successful of all.

That said, there are struggles. I would be a liar if I said that I don’t understand what it was that made Rodney ultimately pull the trigger. Despite having a successful job, a loving wife, a nice house, and being a respected writer for several sites, none of those things matter when the chemistry in your brain decides it is time to go and that it will never get any better.

This day also happens to be my wedding anniversary so it is always a bit bittersweet. In fact, I normally wait until the 16th to post this but, for some reason, that did not feel right this year. I guess because the fact is that he died today. That there is no glossing over it. That denying such is in some way denying that life is filled with both things gained and loss. That both are OK and deserve all of the emotions appropriate for each.

Finally, if you or someone you know is suffering from a mental disorder, I urge you to use compassion and empathy when speaking with them about it. But, please do so. Ask them to seek whatever help they can. Let them know how you feel.

Not sure what more to say other than thank you for listening to me fight through the tears once again.

Fuck suicide. Fuck it to hell.

P.S. The best way to celebrate a writer is to read his writing, most of which is linked or archived on Low End Mac.

Thank You Hater Dedicated to hard working internet trolls...

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 12:21:05 +1000

Thank You Hater

Dedicated to hard working internet trolls everywhere.

Giving Life After Death Row

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 19:23:46 +1000

Giving Life After Death Row:

Once I am executed, let my organs go to people who need them.

Easy Rest Inn Motel/Diner Jill Odice Photography.

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 19:11:02 +1000

Easy Rest Inn Motel/Diner

Jill Odice Photography.

"It took me 10 years to figure out that I have a large karmic debt to pay for the number of Cokes I..."

Sat, 09 Jun 2012 01:37:01 +1000

“It took me 10 years to figure out that I have a large karmic debt to pay for the number of Cokes I sold across this country.”

- Todd Putman, a former top marketing executive at Coca-Cola, at the “National Soda Summit.” (via washingtonpoststyle)

Kickstarter - Tropes vs. Women in Video Games

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 19:40:38 +1000

Kickstarter - Tropes vs. Women in Video Games

Photo

Sun, 13 May 2012 22:47:42 +1000

"How much of my brain is wilfully my own? How much is not a rubber stamp of what I have read and..."

Sun, 13 May 2012 22:47:24 +1000

“How much of my brain is wilfully my own? How much is not a rubber stamp of what I have read and heard and lived? Sure, I make a sort of synthesis of what I come across, but that is all that differentiates me from another person?”

- Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (via reverbelation)

Happy Mother’s Day from the POTUS

Sun, 13 May 2012 20:28:17 +1000

Happy Mother’s Day from the POTUS

‘My Valentine’ - Paul McCartney Official Music Video...

Sat, 05 May 2012 22:58:42 +1000

‘My Valentine’ - Paul McCartney

Official Music Video featuring Natalie Portman and Johnny Depp.

Lisa Scinta is amazing.

Fri, 04 May 2012 21:43:55 +1000

Lisa Scinta is amazing.

Photo

Fri, 04 May 2012 01:17:13 +1000

"that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.” - David Steindl-Rast"

Fri, 04 May 2012 00:48:31 +1000

““that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.” - David Steindl-Rast”

- http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/opinion/sunday/the-joy-of-quiet.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Video

Tue, 01 May 2012 23:23:01 +1000

Letters to the Future Me

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 21:41:45 +1000

Letters to the Future Me :

Adding this to my to do list.