what I do at work

Ever wonder what I do all day at work? Sometimes I wish I could get a glimpse into the day and life of some of my friends. Seriously, the only times we hang out are around food or a drink or Project Runway—who wants to talk about work outside of work? Well, I do, for one. Now's your chance to hear all about me (and other web writers) and what we do behind the curtain on a daily basis. You know you want to know...

This Saturday, I'm going to be a panelist for the Vermont 3.0 Creative/Tech Career Jam at Champlain College in Burlington. I'll be speaking on the "So, You Wanna Write for the Web" panel discussion, with Washington Monthly blogger Steve Benen and St. Mike's Journalism Professor Marybeth Redmond. Seven Days' Cathy Resmer will be the moderator.

We'll be there to talk about what we do, answer questions and share tips with people who are interested in pursuing our line of work.

And it's not just web writers either. There will be a whole slew of different companys and creative/tech careers represented. Here's a full list of panels and times. Ours is the first one of the day at 10 a.m. Cool!

are you living a sustainable life?

Play this Consumer Consequences game from America Public Media to find out how many Earths it would take to sustain humankind if everyone lived like you.

I just played and was appalled to discover it would take 2.9 earths if everyone lived like I do, but then I compared myself to Kai Ryssdal from Marketplace and didn't feel so badly. Much room for improvement...

Bill Clinton at Middlebury

I finally got the chance to listen to the commencement speech Bill Clinton gave at Middlebury College (my alma mater) a couple of weeks ago.

I'm impressed. The subject: building community. Clinton said that every successful community has three things: a broadly shared opportunity to participate, a sense of responsibility for the success of the enterprise, and a genuine sense of belonging. Regardless of our differences. (I immediate thought of my baker friend.) Why is community so important? In a nutshell, Clinton says community is the elemental building block that will enable us to solve all the world's issues. I think he's right. And I appreciate his honesty and prudence for serving up a challenge that's so easily within grasp for all of us.

[Watch the video]

my midd reunion

I got the ultimate validation this weekend at my Middlebury College reunion: as I walked by a group of old classmates who I only vaguely remember in passing, I heard one them say to the others, "Who is that?" with a hint of surprise in his voice.

"That's Penelope Wall."

That's Penelope Wall. As though I was a movie star. Or the ugly-duckling turned beauty queen. It did feel good, but the comment also made me pause and think: Am I really that much different than I was five years ago? Even worse: was I really that unnoticeable back then? If so, then what has changed?

Maybe I walk a little straighter. Maybe I'm a little more confident in my self. Still, being back there amidst the unbreakable cliques of forever friends and married pairs, I never felt more like the shriveling wall-flower that I was as a freshman in college, when I realized that I just didn't belong. Back then, I did made things work and I made good friends, a couple of whom are still quite near and dear to me. But as for the others, we've mostly lost touch and that's okay with everyone involved, I think.

Must I really remember my entire college experience by the way I performed at parties? Socially failing back then, I made the most of my excellent education and as as result my most wonderful memories take place in the library and during vivid discussions in my Lit seminar, as dorky as it sounds. A part from a handful of good friends, the people that I remember most-- those who made the deepest impression--were my professors. But I didn't see any of them this weekend.

I can't help but take note of the irony in the fact that reunion signifies a unification of sorts. My weekend felt like anything but. In fact, without my intellectual backbone, I felt totally dismembered and knocked out of rhythm. Reminded of my socially awkward days, I felt immediately ill in my skin and self-conscious of everything that I said. It dawned on me that this reunion business was all really just a dog show. We were all on parade.

Don't judge me. Forget the small talk. Don't most people prefer conversations that are more genuine? Conversations that have the power to continue and grow organically throughout the years? Conversations that build relationships and community? In that sense, I guess I did have high expectations for my Midd reunion: I guess I was hoping it could have been a little more intellectual and substantial. More academic, even, like in my best memories. And my proudest moments.

a tree grows in Brooklyn

I've always wanted to read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. I've always wanted to read it, because so many friends have recommended it to me. Not because I knew at all what it was about. But you know me and books. I have such a long to-read list, I never end up reading anything at all. Finally, this weekend at the beach, my friend Courtney threw it in my lap. I had no choice but to sit down and start reading. I had no idea what I was in for...

Based on the title alone, I would never have guessed that the book is about an 11 year old girl, Francie, coming of age in the slums of New York. In today's context, the title has a much different meaning than it did a hundred years ago, when Williamsburg represented the rough tenement district of New York. Nowadays, Brooklyn is a great place to live (if you like the city). With that in mind, the image of a tree growing in Brooklyn holds a lot more meaning. It's inherently hopeful, against all odds. Only sixty pages in, I can say that the novel is one of the most significant I've ever read. And I've read a lot. It's full of imagery, history, and personal insight. And to boot, good story-telling too! I love this little girl Francie. She has much to teach me.

I'm also quite surprised I never had to read the book in my American Lit class. The one girl-coming-of-age-in-the-slums-of-New-York novel that I did have to read was Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, a 60-page realist novel by Stephen Crane. Realist maybe, but not real. How could a man in the late 1890s successfully write such a personal and intense story about a little girl and her sexual growth in a way that has any real womanly insight? Needless to say, I felt no connection to it and would have done well to skip it all together and read Tree instead. Maybe you would too.

That said, I still have to finish the book and might feel completely different by the end. But I'm willing to bed that the ending is not so dire, morbid, and utterly useless as the Crane version. Let's hope so.

what brings you here today?

I went to a party last night—another going-away party—for my friend Heather. Yep, I’m losing yet another friend to that greedy state of California. In January, it was my sister Hannah. Last week it was Caroline. Next month it will be my friend Bibba. She’s going to San Francisco.

I moved around a lot—as a kid with my family, in my high school summers, and during college. When I returned home from France after college, I promised myself I’d lay my nomadic shoes to bed for a while, if not forever. I felt a strong urge to be still. To nest and to build my home someplace. I neglected to acknowledge the fact that others might feel differently—that others would move away, move in and out of my life like a pendulum just as I had moved in and out of the lives of so many others in my wanderings.

There’s an upside to this. For every person who swings out of my life, some other great person swings in. My boy Colin, for instance. And there are a small number of people who swing to and fro, exiting and re-entering your life in different and unexpected moments.

A writing professor of mine used the illustration of a straight line (that’s your life path) that’s intersected at various points by a curving line. The curving line represents the people in your life who are inevitably tugged back onto your own path by some invisible and unforeseen magnetic pull.

One day a couple of years ago, I was walking in the North End of Boston with my sister Em, her fiancé, and his family. We had just eaten lunch at Neptune Osyters and were looking for a good place to buy cannollis. I looked up and literally ran into my ex-boyfriend from college. The last time I had seen or spoken to him was about a year earlier when we had both happened to be in Paris as the same time. That meeting was premeditated, but the circumstances that brought us to the same city at the same time were certainly not.

I’m inclined to believe that my professor had something in his vector paradigm. We often use that phrase “it’s a small world!” to explain unexplainable circumstances such as the one I just described. But isn’t it more than mere circumstance? Is there some magnetic force within each of us that keeps us connected to certain others? I find comfort in that concept.

But what of the others? Those who we never see again? Or those we miss by bad timing? We’re not on the same path, clearly. But who decides that? Is it a greater force than us? Or is it governed by our own actions and choices? Oh, the eternal fate versus free-will theory. We may never know.

Still, I’m looking forward to the time when some of these gals swing back into my life. Until then, there are new friends to meet!

competition makes me smarter

I just discovered that a Middlebury education, which was once considered something like "competitive liberal arts" when I was a student there, is now considered to be on the same tier as the Ivies. Apparently students who were admitted just a few years ago would have a hard time of it today solely because of a more competitive applicant pool. I don't buy it. In fact, I feel retrospectively smarter because of this phenomenon.

sudani lunch

I had my first Sudanese meal today as part of a faculty collaborative to discuss the book we’ve chosen this year for the Community Book Program at Champlain College (the book is What is the What by Dave Eggers). I’m not a faculty member, but as a program committee member, I was able to join in.

The menu included:

Appetizer
Tamia: Chickpea croquettes with cilantro, sesame, and garlic

Soup
Shorba: Lamb/vegetable soup with peanut butter and lemon

Entrée
African Chicken in Spicy Red Sauce served with Sudani Rice, Okra with Red Onions, and little rolled up flatbreads, which were a cross between Indian Nan and thick wheat crepes. Flavors included lemon juice, garlic, ginger, nutmeg, cardamom, wine, broth, tomato paste, cilantro, cinnamon, cloves

Dessert
Crème Caramela: Sudanese custard

Drink
Sweet Hot Tea

The meal was delicious and somewhat reminiscent of North African food, with which I’m a little more familiar, and the Sweet Hot Tea served in wine glasses reminded me of the Moroccan mint tea I enjoyed once at the Hammam in Arles, France. There’s something so delicate and refreshing about drinking hot tea out of glass.

At our table of eight, we were lucky enough to have two Sudanese men -- two of the original Lost Boys to arrive in Burlington. One of them, Abraham Awolich, graduated from UVM a couple of years ago and was at the luncheon to talk about his program in Winooski, the New Sudan Educational Initiative. We asked them lots of questions about their expectations of America and their experience as refugees in such an unfamiliar place.

Daily life that we take for granted here turned out to be very complicated for these new Americans. Learning how to ride the city transit, for example, presented a huge learning curve for Abraham. How would he know where he was going or when to get off? His first time on the bus, he ended up riding twenty minutes out of town to Shelburne and then back again, when he really just needed a 3-minute ride up the hill to the University of Vermont. Finally, he was able to get help from a bus driver who pointed him to the right bus. But every aspect of his first days here presented many challenges.

When the chef introduced the menu to us, I asked, “So how accurate is this Sudanese meal?”

Abraham nodded his head and said, “Yes. It’s very accurate. We love these little breads,” he said pointing to the rolled up pancake in his hand, “but we don’t know how to make them. We were too young to learn how to cook when we were still living with our families.”

Everything is “We” when Abraham speaks, which illustrates the camaraderie that developed among these boys and girls during their journey across the continent of Africa, in the refugee camps, and finally here in America as they learned to navigate new systems and cultures. They essentially became surrogate family to each other when their real family was no longer around.

Abraham seemed interested in the food topic, which pleased me. He went on, “we eat a lot of okra in Sudan. But over there, it gets this big,” he held up his hands to demonstrate something the size of a cantaloupe. “You can’t eat it that way, so what they do is grind it up and make soup. We eat a lot of soup there. And milk and ground nuts and grains. But we don’t eat a lot of rice there (it’s too dry to grow it there). We have soba and millet. And there is a lot of tea -- sweet tea. They like it that way and it preserves better in the heat.”

“Do they grow tea in Sudan?” someone in the group wondered.

“Yes,” Abraham replied. “That’s why we drink a lot of it. There’s no coffee, but a lot of tea.”

I thought for a minute and tried to imagine what American cuisine would be -- or Vermont cuisine would be, for that matter -- if all that we ate was what’s available in our local region. Most Americans don’t think or eat that way. Sure, we Vermonters feel pride in our regional products like cheese and maple syrup, for example, and take joy in buying produce from the local farmer’s market. But we also eat mangos and limes and shrimp, even though they’re shipped in from hundreds and thousands of miles away. That’s the Western way of living. Even in Europe, where regional cuisine is still an important aspect of culture and identity, supermarkets are becoming more and more abundant.

And then my mind wandered to my morning cup of coffee. My fabulous rich and creamy, evocative and NECESSARY morning cup of coffee. If I could only drink what was readily available in my region, what would I do?

To say we have it made in the shade is an understatement, but meeting Abraham and his friend (who's name escapes me) made it possible for me to understand this on a very tangible level. It was a very enjoyable and educational experience.

* * * * *

To learn about Ten Things You Can Do for Sudan, click here.

eventful week

• I finished my Designing Media for the Web last night at Champlain College. My final project was to design a personal flash Web site. I decided to try a redo of Penelope Post. There are some kinks I'm trying to iron out and some loose ends to tie up. But for now, I'm letting the whole thing rest. Give me html any day. Still, I'm quite proud of how much I was able to accomplish after just one semester.
  
  
• I signed up for my five year reunion at Middlebury College, which takes place in June. I'm not sure why I did. But I'm a sucker for nostalgia and I guess it'll be fun to see all those people I haven't seen in half a decade and probably won't see again until the next reunion.
  
  
• I went snowboarding in my t-shirt on Sunday. Col and I went to Stowe. I swear it was 70 degrees up there and so sunny. What's more, it was pretty quiet, so we didn't have to wait in any lines. Colin tried to teach me how to butter, but I just fell on my face. I guess I'll miss riding now that the spring's here. But for now, on to surfing!
  
  
• Speaking of snowboarding and Colin, he got offered a new job at Burton, so we'll be staying put! He's going to be a Product Manager for men's outerwear and Special Make-Up. I just know he's going to be great. And now we can all stop crying.
  
  
• I potted some plants, which are all looking pretty wilty at this point, and set up my new self-watering window box that Col got me for my birthday! Hopefully this new contraption will help me become a successful gardener. For all of my efforts and devotion, I don't understand why all of the plants I own end up dying. Boo hoo.
  
  
• Now I know it's officially spring. My feet are undergoing the blister phase that occurs every year when you whip out your summer sandals (it's worse when you walk to work every day!). I'm sporting 5 bandaids--all of which are on my heels. And my my new shoes have been christened with the few necessary drops of blood. Ouch.
  
  
• That's all for now; it's ony Thursday.
  

day with the dinos

In New York. Col and I went to the Museum of Natural History yesterday. It was so cool. I think my favorite skeleton was the giant armadillo--the sign called it a "tank on feet." Too bad we didn't get a picture. But here's the dino that greets you when you walk in. I guess I never really believed dinosaurs existed. I'm not sure I do even now. Are those bones really real?

Col really liked the astronaut ice cream. We tried the neopolitan flavor. It's dehydrated and kind of sticks to your teeth.

We saw a giant blue whale hanging from the ceiling and an artist's rendition of a giant squid attacking a sperm whale. Holy cow. I say "artist's rendition" because here's one thing I learned: no one has ever seen a giant squid alive in its natural habitat--only washed ashore or in a net. The only evidence that this underwater battle occurs is from circular scars on the whale's skin from the squid's tentacles. Cool.

The planetarium (or planeH-arium, as Col likes to say) put on a space show called cosmic collisions. I got car sick from all of the spinning stars, but Robert Redford's voice-over soothed things back into place.

what's your calling?

The NYTimes Select ran an interesting entry today in their blog series entitled, The Graduates: Eight College Seniors Face the Future. Today’s posting is called Wanted: A Future Without Worry.

To be so uncertain of the future -- I know how that feels. Who doesn’t? But I’ve never been a career-minded sort of person. I’m of the school that believes everyone has a calling -- what you end up doing in life is a very personal and organic thing. That takes some of the pressure off having to define your future at such a young age. The trick is not dwelling on uncertainty; rather you should focus on your passions and your strengths, and the rest will come.

Growing up, I always wanted to be and do a million different things. I would be a chef, an artist, architect, dancer, writer, mathematician, chemist, fashion designer. I would speak foreign languages, program computers, build imaginative spaces, and travel all over the world.

My biggest challenge was the idea of having to choose just one future for myself. Luckily I never had to. I took full advantage of my excellent liberal arts education and double majored in English/Creative Writing & Studio Art. I minored in French and studied in Paris for a semester. I joined the cooking club, the modern dance troupe and learned improvisation and the subtleties of sound and movement. I learned the importance of intention and the blessing of organic process.

After college was a little scary: how on earth would I be able to apply all of my skills and passions into one solid career and still be able to make a living? I found my first job as a copy writer for fashion and linens designer, April Cornell, and unintentionally landed in the midst of a world that was almost impossibly perfect for me: the world of web content. It is there I can write, design, build, code, and travel to my heart’s pleasure. I still don’t consider myself a career person. I’m just doing what I love and what I’m good at.

But don’t for one second assume this profession of mine is a flighty one. Indeed, I inhabit a very controlled environment. That’s okay, because here’s another thing I’ve learned since college: sometimes regiment produces the most thoughtful art.

radical lace & subversive knitting

I've been knitting ever since I was a little girl. It was a skill that my mother taught me. An invaluable lesson in arts & crafts. I used my talent to create household or personal items. Say, a scarf or a patchwork pillow made from tidy, hand-knit squares. It was about form that followed function, as an afterthought.

Then in college, I met Hildur Bjarnadottir, an icelandic textile artist who came to my school to teach as a visiting instructor. I've always been fascinated with textiles and textures, and so I decided to enroll in her class called "Textiles and Beyond," an exploration of textiles in contemporary art. The class was very influential in my understanding of art and my appreciation for female craft, too often viewed as second-rate.

Hildur was totally rad. Young with fire-red hair. And an obsession for crocheting giant ten-foot doilies with three-dimensional skull and hand-gun borders. Growing up in Iceland, she was exposed to all of the traditional fabric crafts, for which the country is so well known, alongside an edgy, avant garde art scene. Her question, Is Craft Art?, was a recurring theme in her work and in her class. We certainly learned fiber skills—felting, crochet, embroidery, knitting, spinning, sewing—but we also learned how to approach form from an entirely different perspective. Form does not necessarily follow function.

My favorite piece that I made in the class was a piece of soft, undyed felt that I sculpted around a plain old rock. I sewed on a turquoise zipper so that you can unzip the felt and take the rock out. A custom-made jacket for a rock. It was the first time I created something in which the function actually followed the form. The whole thing emerged out of a process, thus it just made sense from a conceptual standpoint. And yes, I did come to the conclusion that craft can be art. Especially if it has an underlying message.

I haven't seen or spoken to Hildur since, but I still attend my bi-weekly knitting club. And just this morning, I learned about an art exhibit called Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting at the Museum of Arts & Design in New York. The title immediately made me think of Hildur, and wouldn't you know it, her skull-trimmed doily is actually on display at the show. Hopefully I can make it down there before June.

Photos courtesy of www.hildur.net.