george bush is a fucking genius

I mean, what else could it be? I've read Chomsky, The Grand Chessgame, I read international news, Guardian, BBC, Al Jazeera, I've seen all the movies, 9/11, Corporation, Control Room, An Inconvenient Truth....and yesterday, Who Killed The Electric Car....and I've finally been beaten into admitting the truth. This administration is genius. They have managed to control and destroy everything that gets in the way of their greed, and dispose of whomever might stand in their way. I've hated them for so long I've realized it's time to admit defeat and even offer some respect. Axis of Evil Men, you've done it. You are well on your way to destroying the world. How bad ass are you? How proud are you of all you've accomplished? You've rigged elections, you've taken over countries, you've killed hundreds of people a day without an ounce of remorse.....you've exploited our military, developed world policies based on oil, denied support to countries who needed us, stepped on our poor, our elderly, anyone who isn't in the top 3%....And much, much worse, you've destroyed the ozone layer, and you are STILL IN CHARGE. How you got an entire country to roll over and let you destroy it while lulling us into drooling balls of complacency is beyond me. But it's absolute genius.

I mean, honestly...rock on, george. I've really got to hand it to you. And given all this, would it have really been so hard for you to let us keep the electric car?

academic withdrawls

I've just returned from my incredible and amazing experience at Harvard. I can't tell you the amount of joy I felt at being surrounded by 150 other international Non-Profit leaders. I mean, the sweet and satisfying JOY of being surrounded by other people all committed to DOING GOOD IN OUR WORLD. All together. Being understood. For once. Community. With wine.

The Harvard Business School has a Social Enterprise program that reaches out to folks like us and then puts us through an incredibly intense curriculum of classroom, small group, and individual study. It was by far, the most enriching professional experience of my life. Talk about turning on the floodlights in all the dusty corners of my agency and exposing the issues. Talk about being re-energized and motivated to continue to fulfill our mission. Talk about being around the smartest people in the non-profit world and getting to learn from them....and talk about learning from absolutely brilliant professors and researchers....

And the eye candy wasn't bad, either - there are some awfully attractive men doing some really terrific things in the world....

wicked pisser

Wicked pisser is only one of the things my partner's mother says that the men and women of Harvard do not. I was accepted into a Non-Profit leadership course at Harvard this week and arrived on Sunday. J-dog's mom picked me up (I love this woman, but she is incredibly deeply rooted in the blue collar section of Boston.) She offered to drive me to the campus which she insisted only took 15 minutes from her house. 2 hours later, we are still driving madly through Cambridge, her chain smoking and swearing, and yelling out the window at poor young college kids, screaming "where the hell is that goddamned Harvard?" If I could type the tonal quality of that sentence someone somewhere would be cracking up. None of those college kids were laughing but I thought it was hysterical.

She then tried to drop me at MIT but at the last minute noticed that MIT really wasn't Harvard after all, even though they are both old and in Cambridge and "MIT looks exactly like Harvard". I had figured I'd just grab a cab and get the hell out of crazy but she realized her mistake in time. I still offered to get out and grab a taxi but road rage mama was having none of it, so our nicotine fuming vehicle eventually made it to campus 30 minutes past check in. She offered to take me back to the airport at the end of the week, but by the grace of all things holy, I've declined.

sisterhood?

We women are tricky creatures. We alternate between supporting and disparaging each other - and no, not all women, not all the time, so no over-reacting required here because I think you know what I mean.....It's simply this - we underutilize our shared sisterhood. We miss the chance to commune, to commiserate, and to share without judgment. Why? I think often it's out of fear, out of insecurity, and an unconscious reaction to the patriarchal society we find ourselves in.

I have been an admirer of Dawn's True Wife Confessions http://truewifeconfessions.blogspot.com/ Brilliant idea, brillant stuff, brave women. What I like most is that we have a chance to commiserate there as a community. You may not agree, you may not relate to some or (bless you, you one woman in the entire world), to any of it - however, it's a chance to explore and support and laugh and grieve and share in the threads that tie all of us together as we navigate our gender-divided society and the roles we as women find ourselves in, and how they occasionally differ from what we thought they might have been.

Nicely done, sister. Nicely done.

kicking and screaming

I haven't written a lot about my kid even though my kid takes up the majority of my life. And now I am going to go and write about the currently not so nice part about my kid. Please, of course, let me preface this with the statement that I love my kid beyond all things imaginable, she is amazing, brilliant and lovely, and she is incredibly adored by J-dog and myself.

But seriously - this temper tantrum thing is for shit. At 22 months, we've had a relatively easy go of it (I mean, I fell apart and lost my mind, but my kid seemed to be on track, breathing, eating, walking, laughing, and so on). Lately and out of nowhere, we'll get six or seven crying, hysterical, kicking, screaming tantrums A DAY. (an hour?). Being unused to children in general and certainly unused to those who will not be reasonable, it has caused us a bit of concern. While I KNOW it's normal/developmental/books talk about this/I really do know it's normal... I am really wanting MY response to be the right one. Right now I do not give in, and I step over the writhing body on the floor and leave the room. Sometimes she gets a time out depending on if the tantrum has resulted from something I asked her to do and she refused, like, say, wash some clothes or make dinner. kidding. After it's all said and done and she is once again in her own body we hold her and talk about what happened and why it isn't ok. She generally agrees and pats my on the shoulder in commiseration. Then we repeat the whole thing all over again in about an hour.

How do other people handle this sort of thing?

2 acres of prime jungle real estate

It's official! We just returned from our trip to consummate our land purchase. As seems to be the case in Belize, things unfold magically and the planets align. We ran into our seller at the collectivo (taxi) station, (hey, a free ride), and wrapped things up quickly. Talk about a happy collectivo driver and two gringos. The land is lush and has ample floral and fauna growing haphazardly all over it, but simple things like road and river access, and of course, adding a pineapple bush were in order. The village community there is fully resourceful and knowledgeable about how to get simple things done (that completely escape those of us who have never had to work any sort of land in any sort of way) so over cold beers we began mapping out the landscaping and were able to arrange to have some of the work done while we are back in the states.

It should be noted that almost everyone we know in the US thinks we are insane to consider moving us and our baby to the jungle. Grandparents are appalled. Friends are humored. We are idealistically insane but have met enough ex-pats to know it's possible to create this life. The fact that most of them have money and we do not does not escape us, but we are forging ahead (blindly) anyways. Dreams are in order.

My question to you (if anyone actually looks at my blog) is this: How would you create a sustainable living in another country if you had the opportunity to do so? Organic gardening? Cabanas on the river? Day camps for youth? Charter school?

Lastly, I need to give a shout out to Big Slice http://bigslice.clubmom.com/ - I ate nothing but fry jacks and beer on my trip and that has done absolutely NOTHING for the summer challenge. I want to repent for it but they were damn good....