The project of a friend of a friend - looks fascinating! Check it out, and donate if you can.

NUSL's Daynard Public Interest Visiting Fellows Program Lecture this year features Lambda Legal's Flor Bermudez: "Flor Bermudez is the staff attorney for Lambda Legal’s Youth in Out-of-Home Care Project, which addresses the needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual,transgender and queer (LGBTQ) adolescents and adults involved with the country’s foster care, juvenile justice and homeless systems."

Image: source.

I heard this report on the radio on my way to work today - brave people, inspiring story, shameful history: "A half-century ago, the University of Georgia accepted its first two black students. One of them was Hamilton Holmes; the other was Charlayne Hunter. Back then, the future journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault called him “Hamp.” And she has vivid memories of the day they walked onto campus in 1961."

Tough times for legal aid programs across the country: "Law firms may be benefiting from the slow economic recovery, but legal aid groups face the most dire circumstances in decades. The problem is a perfect storm of IOLTA funding declines, cuts in state and local funding, uncertain federal support and a tight private fundraising environment. The situation is exacerbated by steep increases in demand for free legal services as millions of low-income Americans face long-term unemployment, foreclosure and other serious problems." source, via.

"In periods of rapid personal change, we pass through life as though we are spellcast. We speak in sentences that end before finishing. We sleep heavily because we need to ask so many questions as we dream alone. We bump into others and feel bashful at recognizing souls so similar to ourselves.” - Douglas Coupland

New updates from my friend Lipstick Lobbyist, including the news of Boston-sports columnist Steve Buckley's announcement that he's gay.

Image: source.

These geometric post-it notes really do it for me. And anyone who is close enough to me to have seen my planner knows why.

One last best of 2010 list: The Year In Literature, as declared by the always brilliant and witty Bob Proehl.

Today's scheduled workout: bootcamp and 30 min swim. Today's actual workout: well, I slept through bootcamp. This is really unusual for me. I'm an early morning person and I never sleep through things. Ah well, I guess my body/mind needed some more rest - they have both been stuck on overdrive. After work is out, I will head to the gym, and maybe try to do some weights on my own to make up for missing class (although I find weight and strength training very hard to do outside of a class). (I did end up going to the Y last night and doing 4.5 miles (sprint intervals) on the treadmill, so that's something).

"However, the two things must be mingled and varied, solitude and joining a crowd: the one will make us long for people and the other for ourselves, and each will be a remedy for the other; solitude will cure our distaste for a crowd, and a crowd will cure our boredom with solitude." Source.

"Advice to Myself" by Louise Erdrich

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.
Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.
Don’t even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic-decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don’t even think of cleaning out.
That c loset stuffed with savage mementos.
Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in though the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.

Image: source.

Lucinda Williams, "Can't Let Go"

(album version here)

From the NYTimes: Outlawed, Cellphones Are Thriving in Prisons: "Technology is changing life inside prisons across the country at the same rapid-fire pace it is changing life outside. A smartphone hidden under a mattress is the modern-day file inside a cake."

Image: source.

The Manifesto of Encouragement - I like.

The Mountain Goats "No Surprises" (Radiohead cover) (live, from 1999).

I finally made it to the gym last night around 7:30 and got in 6 miles on the treadmill and 15 min in the pool. Clearly I'm having trouble getting to the 30 min in the pool that I'm supposed to be doing -which isn't really a surprise to me. Swimming is hard for me, mentally and physically. Mentally, it's hard for me the way meditation is hard for me - good hard, but still hard. Physically, I didn't learn how to swim laps till I was 22 and training for my first sprint triathlon. I was unemployed and living at home and so could devote 3-4 hours a day to working out and I did. However, after that ended, I basically didn't swim again (except doggy paddling around a pool or lake) and so my swimming hasn't progressed. I feel spent after 10-15 laps, even in the pool, and I really have no idea how I'm going to get the swimming portion of my IronMan done. I'm hoping that just by focusing on short swimming practice for the coming months, and then getting into it full time once my marathon is over in May, I'll be able to see some serious improvement.

I've realized that I'm cranky as hell when I don't workout in the morning (well, it's not the only reason I'm cranky but it's a contributing factor) and I'm trying to figure out how to balance my need for a morning workout with my schedule, need for sleep, scheduled day off, etc. Today is supposed to be a day off from training and working out. That said, I am, once again, cranky as hell and itching to get moving, sweating, endorphins racing. So I packed my workout bag, and we will see what happens. I don't want to burn out but also my training is relatively low key (compared to what some people do), and a big part of my relationship to excercize is for my emotional and mental health so I have a hard time saying no to a workout if it's gonna help me on both those fronts....

The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Image: source.

The Magnetic Fields, "All My Little Words"

Miike Snow, "Animal"

I like these totally manageable but effective tips for the start of the new year. (Yes and Yes is a great blog)

Image: source.

"Visitors at the APS Museum’s Dialogues with Darwin exhibition are invited to continue the discussion of Darwin and his ideas by posting their own thoughts, questions and comments using sticky notes."

Keeping Women in Science on a Tenure Track: "Single women without young children are roughly as successful as married men with children in attaining tenure-track jobs." Ugh. (Thanks for the heads up, PC)

"Why Jim Needs to Remain Huck Finn’s 'Nigger'" Recent edits are "abstinence-only education for race." Well said, ColorLines.

"It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it." - Rainer Maria Rilke

“When people are sad, they don’t do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change. When they get angry, they aren’t interested in logic, they aren’t interested in odds, they aren’t interested in consequences. When they get angry, they realize the condition that they’re in- that their suffering is unjust, immoral, illegal, and that anything they do to correct it or eliminate it, they’re justified.” - Malcolm X

yes yes yes

Image: source.

Public library love! Seriously, renewing my library card when I moved home was one of the best things I could've done.

The Fall 2010 edition of Pace Law Review is "Opening Up a Closed World: A Sourcebook on Prison Oversight" via

Image: source. I'm trying.

Reading Julia Child's My Life In France was one of the most enjoyable reading experiences I had in the last year, so I'm definitely curious to check out this new book of her correspondence. I bet she was a great pen pal.

Currently reading: Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer: Even as someone who has no interest in risking life and limb on the side of a mountain, I was immediately sucked into this book. That said, it is totally stressing me out to read, since the tension and life-and-death tone of being on Everest is so vivid - yikes.

Today's planned workout: 6 mi run, 30 min swim. Today's actual workout: yet to be determined! Since I ended up going back to the gym last night for a 2nd workout, I let myself sleep in this morning (till 7 instead of 5:30) which means that I'm going to have to fit in another evening workout. Still planning on still doing the 6/30 though. In other training news, I went ahead and ordered the bike trainer. I'm pretty nervous about it (making it work in the garage, getting used to it, using it enough to make it worthwhile etc), but also excited.

A long time favorite, the rarest of gems - a sad song that doesnt make me want to slit my wrists. In fact, it sort of reminds me that being heartbroken is a time-honored and widely-shared phenomenon that connects the human race and affirms that I'm still alive. Doesn't quite make it enjoyable. But close.

Emily Gould on Eileen Myles: A Portrait of the Artist Engulfed in Flames

Today's planned workout: 6 mi run. Today's actual workout: 6 mi run. But slow and lots of start and stop, and generally frustrating. Being sick for 2 weeks really messed with my lung capacity, or something, and I'm struggling to get back. The super cold weather doesn't help, and I've reluctantly been forcing myself to embrace the treadmill. Hoping to feel back on track in time for my half marathon. Edit: I had a burst of evening energy and headed to the gym to run 3 more mi on the treadmill and 15 min of laps in the pool - it felt good.

Photographs of philosophers.

"Jason Lazarus is interested in images with intensely personal meaning to their owners — even if he doesn’t know what that meaning is. That’s why he started his project, “Too Hard To Keep,” in which he solicits emotionally charged photographs that people might otherwise destroy." via Fresh Air

Interesting. Its Workers Aging, Japan Turns Away Immigrants: "Japan faces an imminent labor shortage as its population ages, but it has done little to open itself to immigration."

Jezebel gives Chrissie Wellington some much deserved love. As someone new to the world of triathlons and professional triathletes, Wellington has been a real inspiration - she seems to have a great attitude and be widely loved, in addition to kicking ass.

"What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains." - Tennessee Williams

e.e. cummings