Posted by amy at November 20th, 2007

Just one of the things I miss most about the television show “Friends” was their annual Thanksgiving episode. There was little sentimentality, lots of acknowledged dysfunction, and I tended to laugh my ass off when I watched. While I love my family, and enjoy spending other holidays with them, the process of reclaiming my thanksgiving as a day of choice and not obligation has been wonderfully liberating. We’ve been trying to talk our children out of the big “turkey with all the trimmings” propaganda, proposing a menu of foods were thankful for but they will have none of it. When I read our shopping list to my 4 year old today, he circled “lobster” and wrote “NO” - he learned to write his own name a little over a week ago, so I took his objection seriously and left it off the final list. I’m willing to bet lobster was actually on the first thanksgiving table, but I won’t press the point this year.

After the feasting has finished and our guests have returned, I thought I’d head out to two exhibits on Saturday. The first is LEDs Are Pretty at Greylock Arts in Adams. I’ve seen a couple of pieces from the street and it looks really cool. The first (and only?) LED exhibit I ever saw was a Jenny Holtzer (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Jenny Holzer, Dec. 12-Feb. 25, 1990.) Holtzer opened a new exhibit at Mass MoCA this past weekend, so a trip to the big museum will round out my afternoon. There are giant bean bags to sit on while watching the projection, which is a great way to view modern art, don’t you think? On place you won’t find me this weekend is at the Mall.

I usually put off Christmas shopping to the last day, not because I’m lazy or procrastinate, it just seemed more efficient. This year though, something shifted and I wrote out my recipient list - I think the sheer length shocked me into action - and after a night of online credit card abuse, I’m almost done.

How are you with your list? Haven’t started? Haven’t a clue? Looking for ideas? I’ve got a few.

Starting close to home, Danny-O is having a sale on his 2007 Red Sox prints. If you aren’t familiar with Danny-O’s fantastic collages, please click on over and just browse. Most are done on album covers, are inexpensive and easy to frame. He has a huge collection (regional, holidays, seasons) so if heaven forbid you have a Yankees fan on your list, you could cross the divide and offer up a memory of better summers in the Bronx.

I think I’m going to splurge on at least one of these new flip video recorders this christmas. This looks like a great present for the technically challenged (but not phobic) grandparent on your list.

I fell into a really cool site the other night and took care of most of my shopping. ETSY is a site for people who hand make things, and before you roll your eyes and click away, trust me on this one. My biggest caveat with the site is that I found it really helpful to look with a person or an object in mind. I found myself browsing and liking a lot of items with no idea who to give them to. If you are willing to dive in, start with the homepage and their list of hand picked items, want to shop locally, try the geolocator or search by color. The variety, quality and price will surprise you.

Once inside, I needed to work pretty quickly through my list - I like giving fancy soap, and pairing it with a hand made dishcloth, because if it isn’t your cup of tea, you can easily regift it and if it is your cup of tea, then you’ll appreciate it. Shine Your Hiney Soap Company had a beautiful collection of holiday inspired soaps.

Despite living in the digital age, there are still times when I want to send a real card. I’m hoping other people on my list feel the same way and have selected a couple of hand crafted card sets.. Pick a complete set or work the category sidebar and give someone a backup collection of cards for when they get caught off guard without a graduation or birthday card. Practical, fairly inexpensive and not more plastic crap made in China.

Have a Martha Steward wanna be on your list? How about a beautiful apron with matching tea towels. They have camouflage ones for hunter on your list, which in the Berkshires could be half your family. If they are better with a fishing rod than a riffle, this mousepad may be more fitting.

There is always one drunken uncle who can handle a mildly inappropriate gift, how about a bb game?

If your wife is in my knitting circle (or wishes she was) don’t miss the selection of hand-painted sock yarn. Maybe if you pick a color you like, she’ll even make them for you.

Finally, I’ve been told that there are people who still listen to cds, for those people on my list, I’m planning on burning a show or two from the Internet Archives.

So how did you do? Are you close to finishing your list too? Please leave a comment if you found something to share!

Posted by amy at November 6th, 2007

Posted by amy at November 2nd, 2007

Oh faithful readers, please join me in celebrating my triumphant first-place-in-my-division 5k Sam Gomez race last weekend. The more observant reader might notice that I actually came in dead last, a good 15 minutes and 86 seconds behind a gentleman competing in the 75 + division, but you would be the same people who see the glass half empty. Running a 5k on a Sunny afternoon in October wasn’t the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but running it over the age of 75 in under 40 minutes just might be, we’ll see.

A few weeks ago, I gave up my nightly jog for a trip to the attic for yoga. The front of our attic is huge and empty. Earlier this summer, fresh from a weekend visit to a spa with my wonderful mother, I rushed out to home depot and bought a decent sized rug, some candles from pier one and a couple of tapestries later, and I’ve got a yoga studio. I told myself that after the Komen race for the cure, I could move inside.

I didn’t know that I could really make the switch, but one night when I was playing in I-Tunes, I found a great podcast by Hillary Rubin and I’m hooked. If you’d like to try yoga at home, start with one of these. Hillary talks you through each pose with encouragement and advice as if she is in the room with you, watching your body move. “That’s it, now drop your hips a bit, more, that’s it, you got it.”

And yet it is incredibly challenging, both physically and intellectually, because Hillary primarily uses the Sanskrit terms and I just didn’t pay enough attention in yoga classes in the past to match the Sanskrit name to the names I’m familiar with “downward dog” “mountain pose” “wind relieving posture”. I’ve got two yoga books up there with me, one of which is stick figures in poses with names like “bend over” and the other has lots of great images, but is lacking in a Sanskrit index.

Tonight I hit a stumbling block with “Vashistasana to Wild Thing” which brought me down here to my computer, and the urge to share Hillary with you.

I needed a man in my i-pod to get me off the couch and onto a 5k, and now I’m hooked on a woman telling me to drop my heart into my hands and release. I could give up my cell phone today, but you’ll have to fight me for my i-pod.

photography by James Wvinner

Posted by amy at October 28th, 2007

“I want to see girls with educations. I think women are the future of Africa,”
Madonna.

I believe this was the first issue of Vanity Fair that I read cover to cover. I had seen Bono on Oprah talking about his crusade, I’d followed Brad and Angelina’s trips and Madonna’s trips, and Oprah’s project to build a school. They made very little impact on me and my first world concerns. Sounds awful, doesn’t it? But most of what I knew about Africa was corrupt post-colonial governments, the Mercedes tribe in Kenya - named for the brand of car politicians on the take tended to drive around Nairobi.

But there was something about this issue of Vanity Fair that grabbed me and stuck with me. Again and again, I read different people write about the need to educate women, both to prevent the spread of aids and to invest in them for the future. Have we given up on men, a part of me wondered? Can we raise a continent out of supreme poverty by simply educating women? And if women are the future of Africa, does that mean men remain the future for everywhere else?

I’ve been ruminating on these ideas a lot lately as I prepare to teach my first college level women’s studies course. I have spent an inordinate amount of time looking at Women’s Studies syllabi, scanning for books, articles and major points that I need to hit over the course of a semester. But I’ve found that the syllabi haven’t changed in the 15 years since I took an intro course, and they were woefully outdated then. I want to turn my students on to the idea — even if just for just a brief period of time — that they put women at the center of their inquiry and analyze what it means to be a woman at the dawn of the 21st century.

I want to return to Madonna’s statement, and bring it back locally. The regional economy in the Berkshires is one that, on appearance, seems to have a cycle of poverty that traps poor women and writes women off too early in their lives. As the gap between the haves and have nots grows bigger in Africa and in North Adams, one of the questions we’ll be exploring is how can we empower young women to make the transition to the new American economy — one that will require that they be far better educated than most of the women (and men) who came before them?

What do you think?

Posted by amy at October 9th, 2007

I love when a comment spurs a real post.

Dear Dr. Dennum,

Thanks for the arm chair psychoanalysis, the check is in the mail.

Actually, I think what you may be picking up on is a general shift in the direction of the blog. I’ve tried since the beginning not to be one of those bloggers who writes about all the minutia of daily lives - in the beginning, it was clearly a knitting blog, then a parent who knits blog, then an academic technology blog, and now, now it is just my blog. And as such, I use it as a space to work out ideas that I’m recognizing and or working through in real life.

I don’t deny much of what you wrote - I am an achiever, I have been focused on goals through most of my life - most of them were external (degrees, publishing dates, childbirth) and the ones I’m facing now are far more personal and far more satisfying. I feel like I’ve gotten to a point in my life where the scaffolding has come off and I’m able to fully support myself (and a family of four!) and I’m glad to realize that I still have more to discover. What you see as panic, I see as exhiliration. I love my life, I love the path I’ve carved out for myself and I am eager to explore what is in front of me.

That doesn’t mean I’m not able to enjoy the here and now - I just don’t tend to write about the small stuff - like how my eyes watered with pride that my 4 year old son figured out how to hold his pencil right after a week of crying that it was too hard, or the smile that came over me when my daughter informed that another child was not showing respect to his host at an outing at Whitney’s farm. I get the small stuff, I savor the small stuff, but I also know myself well enough to know that I need the big things as well, because, well, because that is who I am and I’m ok with that.

Posted by amy at September 30th, 2007

I’m not sure why I’m so surprised by the following realization, but the fact that I continue to find out new things about myself makes me incredibly happy and makes me optimistic about entering my forties and fifties.

Growing up under the shadow of the baby boomers, I was under the impression that I would peak in my early 20s and everything after that would be a slow decline - in health and in happiness - until death. My study of student protest leaders in the 1960s magnified this impression - looking at how they aged (or didn’t in some cases) wasn’t all that pleasant.

I struggled through my teens and twenties with figuring out who I was, and in the back of my mind was always the refrain that I never wanted to be “one of those people” (who woke up early to fly model airplanes, or who packed the same lunch every day or who never moved from their hometown for example.) I started to let those ideas go as I began to become more comfortable with who I actually was instead of defining myself by what I wasn’t.

And now, now I’m beginning to expand my idea of what I’m capable of. I never knew I could be the kind of woman who … run 5 miles, can do a high ropes course, likes beets! My husband reinforced this for me last week, when explaining to our son Alex why I had to go to Boston to run this race. “Because mommy needs a goal, something she can mark on a calendar and work towards and feel good about herself for reaching.” [slap hand to forehead, yell Wow, you’re right] How could I not have recognized this about myself before?

Just imagine what other cool things I can learn about myself as I set new goals and explore new possibilities.

My next goal? I’m going to start doing some hill training so I can the snowshoeing 5k this winter, and I’d like to get back to my yoga practice? Maybe 50 sessions in 60 days? Sounds doable to me.

What about you, did you ever imagine you could be the kind of person who ….?

Posted by amy at September 20th, 2007

Chris Brogan writes a lot. Almost every day he has a post that catches my eye, about two or three times a week there is a post that I drop what I’m doing to read, and then there are days like today, where I spent some time in his archives getting ready for a presentation I’m doing on Tuesday*

As I was researching, I kept coming back to his top post on “100 blog topics I hope you’ll write”. I could probably write a post about 40% of them, but the one that interested me the most was “How Women Use Social Media.”

Do we really use it all that differently then men? Why isn’t one of the 100 topics, How Men Use Social Media? That started me thinking about some of the social media evangelists that I follow - who all tend to men - and the women who use social media to strengthen their community.

Knitters took to the blogging world early, I remember reading knitting blogs on 9/11, and knitters immediately finding ways to connect and care for each other. The first podcast I listened to was KnitCast, the first place I looked for in Second Life was a hangout for knitters. And it isn’t just about the yarn or the patterns, but it is an assumed community that provides intimate and immediate access. In contrast to the men’s communities I follow, there is little talk of reaching a new audience, turning people on to what is hip or happening. We seek each other out, pass the word along and network among ourselves, and celebrate when a new member wanders in and joins the tribe. And there is now a huge economic component as well, Etsy - like Ebay for crafters, lists 14,036 different hand dyed or hand spun yarns for sale from individual sellers, who work the social media like seasoned pros, send a skein of yarn to top blogger or podcaster and if she likes it, you’ll find yourself with a backlog of orders, your credit card processing company may even shut you down because they doubt anyone could actually be selling that much yarn.

Right now, I’m on a wait list to get into a group called “Ravelry” - a facebook type site for knitters. Raverly is a closed social network, and to control their growth they are slowly adding knitters from a wait list. Ready for this? They are now inviting 500-600 users a day. I just went and looked myself up on the wait list and this is what they said:

Photo by squirrel cottage

• You signed up on August 22, 2007
• You are #27,685 on the list.
• 12454 people are ahead of you in line.
• 6732 people are behind you in line.
• 43% of the list has been invited so far

Do you think this is just about yarn? I don’t — I think this is about community, and so when I see the question “How do women use social media”, my answer is, how don’t we? Maybe we spend less time talking about and and more time just doing it.

—
*Berkshire Cultural Resource Center’s Nonprofit Management Series - 9/25 Online Marketing: Getting Real Results in the Virtual World

Panelists: Joshua Field, Graphic Designer & Owner, Orbit Visual Communications; Bill Reichblum, Founder and President, KadmusArts.com; Amy Stevens Webmaster, MCLA

Posted by amy at September 20th, 2007

Vandalism is never funny, especially library vandalism, especially vandalism at the Boston Public Library - a fine institution where I spent many an hour trolling for handsome graduate students. And yet somehow, the Boston Globe’s coverage of today’s incident left me in giggles. Located about half way down “Christ statue vandalized at library, Lucifer left untouched” was this gem:

Posted by amy at September 16th, 2007

Dear Friends and Family,

I’ve been incredibly fortunate in not knowing anyone directly affected by breast cancer – I’d have to go out two or three degrees of separation to find a breast cancer survivor. Since I’m adopted, it is quite possible that I am at an increased risk of getting the disease, but of course, none of us (not even men!) is immune to the risk.

On my 38th birthday this summer, I couldn’t run for 2 minutes straight, let alone a 5k. I wanted to change that. I began a couch-to-5k program on a Monday, and on Tuesday found out about the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure – a 5k race to raise money to prevent, treat and cure breast cancer.

In the past three months, I’ve been training daily, slowly increasing my run-to-walk ratio, and yesterday I did my first full practice 5k – without walking once!

If you are like me, you hate asking people for money. But the theme of this year’s race is “Friends Asking Friends” and I hope that you will indulge me in this one request.

As part of the Race, I’ve created my own Personal Pledge Page to which you can make a pledge of $25, $50, $100 or any amount (could you give up the cost of a cup of coffee, a pack of smokes, a book or even a skein or sock yarn, for example?) Simply follow the link or you can visit www.komenmassrace.org and then click the “Donate to a Participant” link (left side) and search for my name.

Thanks for all your support!

Amy

Posted by amy at September 6th, 2007

This morning, I sent my daughter off to her first day of Kindergarten and my son off to Pre-K. How did they get so big, so fast?