Kittens on a Roomba

OMG, this is SO PAINFULLY CUTE AND HILARIOUS. Kittens on a Roomba. /dying

The photo above, from Amazon Watch, is a human banner created by indigenous persons demonstrating at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Brazil, to raise awareness about the deforestation of Amazonian rainforest.

Living deliberately

My neighbor had me over for coffee this morning, which was just so lovely. She's a really interesting, creative, generous person, a gardener and a baker, who thinks deeply about things and does lots of engaging activities, and is always a source of joy and light in my world. A recent retiree from Ford, she has a really different set of experiences from me, but a similar world view in many ways, and it's fascinating to talk with her. We talked about singing, about death and loss, about her involvement in the threshold choir, about the nature of leadership, and most of all about the inauguration. We shared pannetone and her homebaked ginger and coconut cookies over the coffee and I played with her cats. I could see this being a wonderful regular Friday occurrence when I'm hiding out in the cottage reading about Native American and Aboriginal Australian child policy for my social work prelims.

I have a new toy, which I love. I was inspired when I saw that my favorite aesthetician in Ann Arbor believed in it. Wow. My face has never before felt so soft and clean.

It continues to snow and snow. The icicles are giant out here.

I haven't the slightest idea how I can catch up, I am so behind from being away for a week so early in the semester. I guess I'll buckle down this weekend and see what I can do.

Talking Heads

THIS is both frightening and strangely fascinating. And makes me think about Fight Club all over again.

Luke Bergmann, and what practicing anthropology and social work really looks like

I can't begin to say how proud I am of my colleagues, how incredible I think their achievements are and how grateful I am to share an intellectual space with them. Luke Bergmann is an exemplar of what we do best, and what I aspire to achieve. He's an inspiration to me of how knowledge from anthropology and social work can fuse into something quite new and remarkable, a radical way of approaching the world to understand the experiences of other people, their beliefs and challenges, and to address their suffering in powerful and uniquely sensitive ways. Luke continues to live and work in Detroit to help improve the conditions in the city where he spent three years living and studying the lives of drug dealers for his doctoral dissertation.

Luke's dissertation-turned-book, Getting Ghost, circulates and receives rave reviews. He's going on a book tour this month that includes the Bay Area, Portland, Chicago, and Ann Arbor.

Below I'm pasting the event description for the Berkeley event. If he's coming to your town, I highly recommend going to check out the event.

Wednesday, January 28, 7:30 PM at First Congregational Church of Berkeley

LUKE BERGMANN

Getting Ghost: Two Young Lives and the Struggle for

the Soul of an American City

While some American cities like New York have recovered from the depths of their urban decay in the 1970s and 80s, Detroit is admittedly not one of them. A city pockmarked with ever more abandoned neighborhoods, empty lots, and vacant factories, Detroit is where sociologist Luke Bergmann connected in a juvenile detention facility with Dude Freeman and Rodney Phelps -- two teenage petty drug dealers facing profoundly uncertain futures. Following Dude and Rodney, Bergmann spent three years embedded on the streets of northwest Detroit, living side by side with its residents, and from these experiences comes Getting Ghost, an unforgettable portrait of two young men and of the troubled city they call home.

A tour de force of original analysis and powerful storytelling reminiscent of Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family and Sudhir Vankatesh's Off the Books, Getting Ghost chronicles Dude's and Rodney's lives, tracking their attempts to get by however they can in a city betrayed by broken promises of urban revitalization, where the drug trade is so ubiquitous that entire families are involved. Bergmann portrays the lives and work of young African American drug hustlers not as the product of some exotic inner city jungle that we can't possibly relate to, but rather as an often seamless part of the everyday reality of the larger African American community.

Luke Bergmann was a postdoctoral fellow at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health and an associate research scientist at the Prevention Research Center in Berkeley. He is now a research director at the Detroit Department of Health and Wellness Promotion and a faculty associate of the University of Michigan. He lives on the East Side of Detroit.

Color

I am contemplating painting my cottage living room . . .

I'd been thinking about it for a long time, but part of my inspiration, I think, is the deliciousness of Caffe Trieste, where I spent many mornings during the break eating sumptuous pastries and savoring perfectly prepared lattes. This photo is of the yummy Italian yellow I am interested in emulating, though it doesn't really do the cafe (or the color) justice, because of the poor light.


The thing is, though, the colors I admire other places always seem more mustardy than I feel prepared to explore in the house. I wonder what it would be like to dare to go that direction. My room in Ann Arbor ended up being more lemony than I think I want to do here by the lake, if I do decide to paint.

The boundaries of suffering and honor

This article in the New York Times on the Purple Heart is fascinating to me from an anthropological point-of-view. The ways that Americans are grappling conceptually with mental illness and the ways that veterans' health problems in recent wars challenge our existing categories of pain and suffering would be a fascinating dissertation topic, if I didn't already have an area of study carved out. It needs further investigation, too, in light of how shamefully neglected our veterans often are. The bureaucratic nightmares facing veterans and their families that I heard about on NPR on Veterans Day brought tears to my eyes.

It's not a novel argument for me to point out that medical advances in past decades allow many persons to survive physical injuries that would previously have killed them. How we come to terms with the person who lives on, though, and what unique needs and challenges s/he experiences, is something we are only beginning to scratch the surface of. But why must we culturally delineate those forms of suffering from the ones of those who cannot return to everyday life for other reasons? This is such a complex question, and so evocative to me of how intuitive it is for us post-Enlightenment beings to separate body from mind.

John E. Bircher III, director of public relations for the Military Order of the Purple Heart explains: “You have to had shed blood by an instrument of war at the hands of the enemy of the United States. Shedding blood is the objective.”