While watching the live quorum Monday Night, I made a joke to the Kansan sitting next to me that it was kind of like birdwatching. Trying to pick out the senators and match them to a visual. Being all old men with gray hair it is always more difficult. This was nothing like Monday night football, where numbers would have helped.
What is hard and very disappointing is that most interns on the hill do not recognize the Congressperson that they share an elevator with, pass by in the hallway, or run an errand for. Some interns however did memorize the "Bird-Almanac".
How does Capitol Hill work so differently than other...'institutions'? Connections are key, Information is fluid, especially the myths about the physical Capitol itself. Even experts say that rumors spread through these walls like butter. This reaches Congress at many different levels of Congress.
Tours are my personal favorite. 1. you get to watch a movie 2. you look like you know everything 3. you are not condemned to a stinky old office. When not in session, life can get a bit dull. So fixing constituent lists by adding the Mr. and Ms. is usually all there is to do in a days work. And you ask how is this going to help me on my way to being Secretary of State?......
Well the answer to that one is not completely obvious to me yet either. So for the time being I can say I am happy to be here to meet new people. One thing is for sure I need to maintain those contacts. And coming from Kansas we tend to know how to do this in the friendliest ways. Gift baskets, fruit cakes, Christmas cards, frequent facebooking. Skype is new (my mom's fav).
The connections I make however, might be Congresspeoples and they might not be, those connections are important to maintain as well. But the most important people are those who you believe could support you in the future career-wise, and maybe you could do the same for them.
Although I live in the NE, lots of interesting things have happened in the NW, SW, SE of the DC.
Acronyms haven't been common for me in the past. Now I live in a place where everyone comes from everywhere and MIK (more in the kitchen), and ITB (in the barn) no longer are used but rather PTFO, LMFAO, FML, JB....etc. IGO, UN, UNDP and the list goes on. I feel left out because I was not given a dictionary for these 'short-speak' terms.
Above is a picture of (L-R) JB friend, me, Ambassador to Costa Rica(former president's daughter), and my Ukrainian/Chicagoan roommate. This adventure to the Costa Rican Embassy was for their Independence Day Parade Celebration. (Technically I was in Costa Rica for a couple of hours.)
My connection was through soccer of course. Having been recruited to the Kick Tease team by a guy in a law program at Georgetown University with a majority of international lawyers in it. One of the lawyers was Costa Rican and invited us to this event.
Food, dancing, meeting people, learning about a culture, I have never been to, completely excited my roommate and me to the point where we needed to check out other embassy events. However it seemed that the non-'third-world', non-'south', tended to be more expensive than we were willing to pay. And our research still needs to extend to the Senegalese, Sierra Leonean, Argentine, and other embassies.
Weekend adventures have proved promising. Karaoke in Alexandria, Festival on H Street in the NE, exploring, and meeting new people all falls into what I wanted to discover about a big city.
Having planted new routes in the town of Washington DC, I am energized, focused, and developing new opportunities. Refreshing is hard, changing routes was never my thing and I try to establish a routine everywhere I go.
Leaving the past two years behind is so relieving and liberating. College is a bubble, 2 years may be enough to get what you need and get out, 4 years will be enough to make an impact while you're there.
During the summer of no destination, a.k.a job searching, I discovered;
how working hard for something doesn't necessarily mean you should.
Taking things with stride tend to leave you with better results.
Being open to things you weren't before can change you for the better.
Surprise is a feeling that guarantees you're alive.
Do not let the conflict between men and women stop you. Let your light shine and do not let the other sex define you. Let you and your gender be there, no need to impress or fear being a woman or a man.
No race should interpret your culture or heritage. No socio-economic forces should determine who YOU are when you strip yourselves of clothes, money, food, and just BE.
Let the women glow like the sun and shift like the crazy wind. Sometimes what one needs to get on is an exasperation, an exhalation, a scream, a yell, a holler. More so an act of powerful force done. Hopefully positively.
Insanity is not as insane as it looks because there is even something more insane, unexplainable, irrational, and unstoppable.
Let her go free. Let him be simple.
Let them collide and separate.
Let things be - do not force and you will always be free.
Control is not the answer. But love, trust, honesty, understanding, and personal touch is key.
Although it is the season for potato planting, these are not the roots I am referring to. I am referring to coming home for Spring Break after a long, annoying winter. It did snow, however, which was not very nice but the fish were, and are, still biting. And now that it has melted and my bogs are going crazy I took a lovely 8 mile run/walk around, took the Evening Star route - gorgeous! Might have to do this every other day, because this afternoon my knees are throbbing!
Bourriaud commented on how modernism is a return to your routes..oh I mean roots, and how altermodernism is the picking up of those roots and planting them somewhere elsewhere, while having the option of continual connection to the original root. Well, as I am applying for jobs and connecting to all of these networking improvements, such as LinkedIn and Twitter, I question whether I want a job here, in Kansas, or there, wherever there is. I would take anywhere, in fact I'd prefer it, being so young and all, but getting there would hopefully be paid for.
But if I would get a job in my hometown, where I would love to eventually settle, I would have numerous set connections and I would no longer be a stranger (having gone to a high school and elementary school out of town and all I really have 'displaced roots')
Another question is whether I even have the original roots at all or are they loosely placed and ready to fly away? Adventures always seem a logical solution to this dilemma, but how much credibility to they actually have in the job market? Probably none, dealing with people and not escaping them is an asset one needs to build on. Creating roots seems to be another solution that may be harder, but perhaps more beneficial. Wherever these roots are created, Wisconsin, Texas, Kansas, abroad...I plan to always keep them planted because if you burn one of those bridges sometimes you end up not being able to go back.
One week isn't enough to build a root system, but can be a good start. So I guess we should go plant those potatoes.
Lawrentian look into media and the society where they live or have visited or are visiting. Americans having visited, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Uganda comment on their first impressions, their realizations, and describe the profound change they have undergone after having been there.
Africans from Ghana and the Sudan comment on their first impressions of America and Americans, and how the media plays a very important role with the expectations they had before they came.
These comments and opinions about media within the two VERY DIFFERENT societies puts our generation on a level playing field with media but the perspective of the media creates an uneven playing field yet again. If media were to "show the good side of life" in Africa as well as what it has been showing, and then also show the hard side of life in America as well as what else it has been showing, thenit would be a level playing field.
"The person is intelligent, people are stupid" - K, MIB
As technology has increased the awareness of other cultures in far far away places, people have been either less and less or more and more informed about that culture. Controlling or ...informing, excuse me...a large amount of people tends to create social culture in a media-lead world. Although information may be available to everyone on the net, people still need to be told where to look.
Usually people associated with some type of social group, through church, museums, sports, opera houses what have you, hear about whats new, good, or better through word of mouth. I heard about Drudge Report from a friend for example, not from Google-ing "best political blogs", although if I had it still would not have been on the front page, yet it is still a popular social source for political news among conservatives. Now depending on where you stand, you either choose to like the link because of its stance (that's being partisan) or because of the variety of links provided (this is being qualitative), or because of the number of links provided, and therefore by some logic declaring it diverse? (that is being quantitative)
The one thing about the internet is its power to destruct the idea of nationalism and within that a pure claim to cultural identity. If there are no segregated nations or cultures on the web, then does this mean differences can be solved, nations can find common ground through this technological void, and there would/should be no more war? It is a possibility, but we are not there yet. The reason I bring up Matt Drudge's political blog page is because he almost started a war by taking what he thought was true and posting it as truth. It is because of the social network online which has taken his blog for granted and the unreliability of certain media that these mistakes occur. However, people also have the responsibility of not taking his blog for granted, but this just supports the idea that people are stupid. But by people taking a blog's legitimacy and truth for granted because it is referred to them through an online (or not) social network, everything played at the opera is good, or everything in a museum is art.
It tends to be a "location material" that people are attracted too and when transferred to the net it takes the same form and function of a social structure, but in this case social has become a form on indirect social. These people do not know each other but they know what each and every other one of them likes, therefore creating a detached social network where you can remove yourself without...harm, because that person doesn't actually know you.
Public Interest or Public Opinion are what now drives the good and bad levels of art, books, and perhaps academics. But what is it that has been declared a 'good video' on youtube, or an 'amazing' song on the radio? Something that someone else has told you about, and because of that person's attraction to it, it is, by popular choice, good. But what is quality? Does public opinion know quality over quantity? Can we really classify people in qualitative groups? Is this global capitalism*, even though what we are consuming is virtually free? How long will this freedom last? Youtube videos' embedded ability is becoming restricted, and without a social network telling one where to find videos or music, it is hard to utilize the web efficiently. Can the collective whole become intelligent enough to out maneuver web restrictions? Some have, however those are anti-social individuals. Is the internet educating the people as a whole?
3rd Rock from the Sun provides a good look at how what someone from the outer space would think of our social customs, and preferences. Deciding whether humor is quality or what is primitive, through looking at your lifestyle as if you've never lived it, or as if you never were trained to live like others, can be a good way to evaluate how we do things here on Planet Earth. The movie Brazil where the audience is introduced to a new world, rather than viewing those being introduced to your world, also can carry the question what is quality? or the message that although you are human that does not mean you cannot be alien or vice versa. Although you are a piece of readymade that does not mean you cannot be art - Marcel Duchamp.*
