Curls or no?

I got my hair cut today, and on a whim asked the stylist to flat iron my hair while I was there. It was out of curiosity more than anything else, since my hair is naturally quite curly and I've never had it professionally straightened before. And if I did it on a day when I wasn't already getting a haircut, I would have to pay $35 for it, and this way it was free, so I figured I'd go ahead and do it. Ignoring the fact that the photo of me isn't very good, here is the shot that offers the best view of the result:


For comparative purposes, here is a similar photo of me featuring my hair in its natural state:


I know which one I prefer. But it's fun to change every now and then.

Consumer charity

I watched the last three weeks' worth of American Idol over the past couple of days, which means that my avoidance of entertainment news can end (thank God, because I was really starting to miss TMZ). To be honest, the strike wasn't really worth it, especially considering the cop-out "no one gets voted off" schtick that they pulled on Wednesday. The charity thing was hokey, somewhat grotesque, and slightly reminiscent of being in a zoo, but according to an article on their website, it has raised over $60 million already. That's about how much the initial grant from USAID was to fund the project that I work on that was initially designed to spend five years addressing TB, malaria, and AIDS, the same issues that Idol Gives Back is focusing on in Africa. You know it's for real when even the Gates Foundation (through Nothing But Nets) is involved.

On some level, it seems wrong that such massive campaigns to help dying people only ever seem to be generated when linked to consumption and profit, like the Red campaign. But it's not as simple as demeaning marketing ploys. It makes sense to donate money that people would be spending anyway. It makes sense to encourage people who would otherwise not even think of donating to do so by selling the idea of charitable acts along with whatever products they are already consuming. This is the idea that Bono has bought into wholeheartedly.

It is upsetting on a broader level to think that people can buy a red phone instead of a silver one and then tell themselves that they have done their part to help save the world. And it is upsetting to think that choosing the charitable product over the non-charitable version that you were already going to buy is the extent of many people's charitable giving. But given that those people weren't going to give anything before, and given that the money is badly needed, I think it makes sense to attempt to channel consumption that already exists into actual dollars that can go to people who really need the assistance.

I guess the thinking goes that it would be great if everyone who could afford to do so spontaneously opted to give money to important causes. But since they don't, and since their money is sorely needed, it's impossible to accept only those donations that stem from pure goodwill: beggars can't be choosers.

And it is absolutely true that many people are just genuinely unaware of the great need for these things, even if it's because they've created their own impermeable bubble to spend their lives in. So if anything that can be done to pierce that bubble, it should be. Especially when you get over $60 million in two days.

I'm aware that this post sounds somewhat sanctimonious and probably overly serious. And it's not like I'm sending off piles of cash to Africa each week. But it is a complicated issue, and a somewhat depressing highlight of what nearsightedness a consumer-based culture like ours can engender. But at the same time it's encouraging to know that consumer-based cultures aren't synonymous with selfishness as much as they are with an inward focus. People don't look around them and see what they can do, but if someone makes them aware of it, they are unselfish enough to do something about it.

And I also believe that pure unselfishness does not exist. Any time we do anything good, even if we don't get any material benefit from doing it and even if it's an extremely challenging thing for us to do, we do it in part because we think we should, or because it makes us feel good. We do it because of our own motivations. It's natural, it's human, it might be depressing, but ultimately I think it's okay. And I'm glad that when people living in such a culture are shown images, even grotesque ones reminiscent of colonialism, that they react and reach out.

Double-decker buses are a dream come true.

I have to say that I was certainly not expecting to be posting to my blog during my trip to France. But it is currently 11:37 p.m. and my whole French family is asleep and I don't have anything to do until tomorrow at 1:30. So I borrowed my French brother's laptop, and here I am, posting. I wonder if the settings will somehow show up in French. Apparently my out of office autoreply at work now has the automatic part showing up in French. I guess somehow when I logged into the account from France, it got set up in French automatically. I find that very strange, but whatever.

Anyway, so I'm in Toulouse at the moment (actually, I'm technically a few kilometers outside of Toulouse in a tiny village on top of a wooded hill, for real, because I used to live in a fairy tale and I am lucky enough to get to visit it again from time to time). Before I came here I spent a few days in Paris. I did a few things I had done before and a few things I hadn't done before, notably a visit to the Père Lachaise cemetery, which is absolutely gorgeous and which houses the graves of Richard Wright, Jim Morrison, Edith Piaf, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas (they share a grave, adorably), Oscar Wilde, Jean de la Fontaine, and Molière (though those last two were moved there posthumously for marketing reasons, apparently), among many other famous people. It's a pretty amazing place. Tragically, I didn't have my camera with me at the time.

I made up for that later, though, because we took an open-top bus tour through Paris and I took hundreds of photos. The funny thing about Paris is that I've seen it all before and I don't even like it that much, but it never stops being photogenic. It was the first time that I had really gotten a chance to use the camera that Torsten gave me for Christmas. The best thing about that camera other than its general high quality photos is its 12x optical zoom. So I took lots of closeups of things. It made a nice change from the traditional photos I have of the Paris landmarks. I was lucky as well that the weather was gorgeous and clear and sunny. I'm paying for it now with cold, damp weather in Toulouse, but at least I had a day of really fun photography.

Anyway, my point here really is that I am now a convert to a huge tourist trap: the open bus tour. Those things cost tons of money (about $40 apiece in Manhattan and about 26€ apiece in Paris - P.S. I find it somewhat strange that to type the dollar sign on the French keyboard I am using I have only to press one key, but to type the Euro sign I have to press three keys). But they are amazing. Seriously, if the weather is good there is very little that is nicer than sitting on the top of a double decker bus in the sun, enjoying the breeze and the view and getting to look at everything well-known about a city. Obviously this isn't the only thing that I would want to do when visiting a city, but I think it is the best possible way to do all the normal touristy things and still enjoy yourself. Also, I especially liked the Paris bus because in order to listen to the guide you had to plug in headphones, which I happily did without.

I love these bus tours so much that I almost peed myself with excitement when Torsten told me that he saw an open-top bus drive by when he was working in Caribou in DC. As soon as I get back, he and I are totally going on one of those. It's going to be awesome.

Apparently my brain has a two-language maximum.

So I had dinner with my friend Erik last night. Erik and I met when I was studying in Senegal and he was working at the center that organized my classes. We also worked together on the magazine the center produced. He lived in Senegal for a couple of years and was in Peace Corps in Guinea for a couple of years before that.

Point being, he speaks Wolof much, much better than I do.

Anyway, last night at dinner my blog somehow came up in conversation. And then I learned that I made an error in Wolof when I named the blog. I thought "du wax loolu" meant "shut up," but in fact, "shut up" is "bul wax loolu." Which I actually knew once, now that Erik has reminded me.

This is somewhat embarrassing but luckily, all is not lost. "Du wax loolu" is still a meaningful phrase. It translates to "She [or he] doesn't say that." Which I've decided (primarily because it's too late to rename the blog) is a more oblique, postmodern name for a blog than "shut up" anyway.

In other (foreign, sort of) news, I am leaving tomorrow for a two-week trip to France. I'll be spending a few days in Paris, visiting my friend Pascal, and then spending the bulk of the trip in Toulouse with my host family from high school. Torsten and I have already planned a marathon American Idol/House session for when I return. So while I'm there, I will have to avoid all news sources so that I don't accidentally find out who got voted off American Idol before I see the show. In a way, it's sad that I can't look at hard news without being informed of the latest in reality television. But it is even more sad that I am voluntarily remaining ignorant about what's happening in the world for two weeks just so that I am protected from finding out about the results of these reality shows. So I guess that shows where my priorities are. Can I really blame the news media for catching on to the public's priorities and mixing hard news with stuff that people really want to read about? Probably not. What a shame.

Hypocrisy at its best

Things that George Bush does often piss me off. In fact, there are very few things he does that do not piss me off. His sleazy maneuvering and his empty threats and his crappy rhetoric and his attempts to insinuate that everything he has messed up since the beginning of his presidency is somehow the fault of Democrats, and the way he relies on a bunch of manipulative tricks to try to convince the (admittedly gullible and more often than not downright idiotic) American people that what he's doing is somehow right and necessary just infuriate me. They make me so angry that there is really nothing I can say to properly convey how much he pisses me off. I have no idea what he's thinking, if he's thinking at all, if he actually holds any regard for his role as the technical leader of the country, if he actually has any regard for the concept of democracy as something in which the elected leader enacts the will of the people, and whether he truly believes that what he's doing is good for the country, or for anybody at all. I really, honestly just do not understand the motivation beyond simple self-absorption and total oblivion for him to do the things that he does. He spends all this time talking about how he doesn't want a Democratic Congress to revert to politics and prevent things from getting done. He's busy trying to spin his veto of the war spending bill as the Democrats withdrawing funding and hurting American troops. He's all about spin and politics, and those are exactly the things for which he attempts to criticize his political opponents.

The list of specific things that he's done that particularly infuriate me is very, very long, and since I suspect that my blog readership has a fairly liberal bent, I won't bother enumerating them. But some of the heinous things he's done as president are so, so much worse than the thing that I'm upset about right now that I almost feel a bit foolish even being upset.

What I'm mad about right now is the fact that, knowing that he would not get the votes to obtain Senate confirmation for his nominee for ambassador to Belgium, Sam Fox, Bush waited until Congress went into recess and then used his power to make recess appointments to just appoint Fox anyway.

This makes no sense to me. I mean, it does in that it's a very clever way to get what you want without other people bothering you. It's sort of like a little kid cleverly choosing which parent to ask for permission to do something controversial: you know Mommy won't say yes, so you wait until she's not home, and then you go ask Daddy. Except in this case Mommy and Daddy wouldn't say yes, so Bush the Giant Little Kid waited until they both weren't home, then did what he wanted.

In what way is this good leadership of a democratic country? In what way is this representing the needs and wants of the people? Granted, he doesn't have to worry about re-election, but he does have to worry about his legacy, both in terms of how he will be written about in history and in terms of how the Republican party will fare in the 2008 elections. When his approval ratings are so low that he had to search high and low for Republican candidates who would allow him to stump for them in 2006, why would he take it upon himself to throw into the faces of the American people, one more time, that he's the president and even though they wish he weren't, there's nothing they can do about it? I can almost hear him cackling, "Nyah nyah nyah" at us as he deliberately ignores the wishes of the majority.

Obviously, he owes Sam Fox a huge favour, given that many people credit Fox with singlehandedly preventing John Kerry from winning the 2004 presidential election. And isn't it nice to know that political favours to horrible people trump the possibility of grasping at even a thread of the idea of democracy? Isn't it nice to know that even if Bush hadn't lied about WMD as a justification for the Iraq war, and even if he had just relied on the pure rhetoric of "spreading democracy," that he would be as hypocritical as ever? His lies and his lack of conviction in the bullshit that he says about democratizing the Middle East are already utterly transparent, but his inability to even pretend to care about the desires of the voting public in his own country just takes the cake.

This feeling of fury and impotence is one of the most frustrating combinations ever. 2008 cannot come soon enough.

On motherhood?

So, when I'm bored at work (which seems to be happening a lot recently... I get the impression that when I take the next two weeks off, absolutely nothing will happen in my absence, and yet there will be very little for me to catch up on when I return), I often browse a series of blogs, starting with those that I actually like and ending with those that are interesting, if horrifying. One such horrifying blog is called I Saw Your Nanny, which is basically the Community Nanny Police, otherwise known as the Human Nanny Cam. The idea is that people send in "nanny sightings," which can technically be good or bad but nine times out of ten are bad. Every now and then there will be a sighting of something that is legimitately worrying and specific enough to actually be useful, but most of the posts seem to run to a vague description of a nanny, usually not anywhere near specific enough to be recognizable ("black nanny, medium build, 20 to 30 years old"), and an explanation of how she seemed inattentive to her charges. The most interesting part of the site is the comments on the blog, which tend to be vitriolic, often racist, and written by people who seem to hold personal grudges against either nannies, stay-at-home-mothers, working mothers, rich people, poor people, or some combination thereof.

Reading that site usually makes me feel like less of a person, but sometimes I'm bored enough to stoop to it. I'm glad I did, though, because when I couldn't take any more of the nasty nanny flame wars, I clicked on one of the links to another blog, and from there to another blog. And that's where I found a blog called Purple is a Fruit. It's a motherhood blog, written by a married woman with a 19-month-old child living with her husband near Seattle. It's part of a website called ClubMom, which I think is kind of a neat, if yuppie-ish concept. It's amazing, as I read this blog and its comments, to see how many times we reinvent the wheel when it comes to parenting. It seems like millions of children encounter the same issues every day, but because many of their mothers have never been mothers before, and they don't have much in the way of a support system, they have no idea that the behaviour their child is exhibiting is normal, and they become scared. These things like ClubMom are in some ways too cutesy for my taste (see the daily cutest-baby-photo competition, not to mention the excess exclamation points scattered throughout the site) and the focus is decidedly narrow (lots of talk of playgroups, diapers, and the best way to handle a toddler tantrum in public). But the thing is that such narrow and dull-seeming topics are really important issues to parents. How do you teach your child not to be a selfish brat who thinks that pounding his head on the floor and disturbing 100 otherwise-peaceful shoppers is an appropriate way to get what he wants? And how do you make sure your kid has friends so that he doesn't grow up socially awkward, while at the same time keeping the parents from going nuts spending their days cooped up with a child who can barely talk? Sites for moms, especially young and/or new moms, are really useful sources of information, and they have a friendly community feel to them that I really like.

Maybe it's scary that I find all this stuff so interesting, or that I can totally see myself turning to a site like this for advice when my future child goes on a hunger strike, starts preferring his father to me, or otherwise does something that I think is horrifying but that many children have successfully weathered before. I think part of it has to do with the fact that I was a nanny for an eight-month-old boy in 2005, and a lot of these issues actually came up for me, and I loved that child intensely. And it scares me to imagine that supposedly I will feel so much stronger about my own child, because I already really cared about this baby that I only saw three times a week.

Anyway, Purple is a Fruit is a great blog because it deals with all these issues, but it's also witty and intelligent and very well-written (and exhibits a distinct lack of gratuitous exclamation points). So even though I'm barely 23, and don't plan on having children anytime soon, and should be way too hip and urban to even bother with a blog like that, I am going to defy convention and add it to the links section of my own blog. Because I think it's a great blog, and that's really the only criterion I have for my links. And who knows, maybe if I maintain this blog for long enough, one day it will turn into a mom-blog too. Isn't that an alarming thought?

Noah!!

So when I picked Florida to win the NCAA tournament in my bracket, I didn't know anything about them, and had actually forgotten that they had won the championship the year before. I only saw an entire Florida game for the first time on Saturday when I watched them beat UCLA. And I found myself totally unimpressed with them, not as basketball players but generally with their attitudes. They seemed sort of cocky and their fouls were sometimes cheap and obnoxious. I almost regretted picking them. They have this whole long story about how they won last year and three of them considered going pro and they all decided independently of one another that they would stay for another year but only if the others also stayed, and they had the same starting five this year that they did last year. I made my peace with most of the team, but I really had some trouble with Joakim Noah, who really very badly needs a haircut. See below:


This image doesn't perfectly capture the horror that is his hair, but it's decent enough to convey the main idea. I can't imagine what his hair must look like when it's loose, but I picture it in a giant, poofy triangle. I think my brother-in-law put it best when he said that every time he sees Joakim Noah, he just wants to grab a razor and forcibly shave his head.

Plus, the guy is super emotional and screams and pounds his chest a lot. See below:

But then I was reading this article about the Florida team's conversation on Sunday about who each player thought was the greatest men's college basketball team of all time, and Joakim Noah said that he didn't think he was qualified to answer because he spent most of his childhood in France and didn't follow college basketball.

Having lived in France myself, I was intrigued by this statement, and even more so when Torsten (a big tennis fan) excitedly asked me if I knew who Joakim Noah's father was. So I looked it up, and it is nobody other than Yannick Noah! Now, I realize that most of you won't even know who Yannick Noah is, but he was a big tennis star in the '80s and '90s, and he's currently a very popular French musician (although he is actually half Cameroonian). I even have one of his songs, Métisse, on my iPod. And I used to really like that song a lot, until I got sick of it. Yannick Noah is an amazing person, and really into charity work, and I am mad at myself for not recognizing him when the camera kept zooming in on him during the game last night. Although I did notice that he looked familiar, and that he was dressed awfully stylishly for someone's middle-aged dad.

And I also noticed that Joakim Noah's mom and Yannick Noah's ex-wife, who was also shown on camera a lot last night, was quite attractive as well. It turns out that this is not a coincidence; she was Miss Sweden in 1978.

So my (somewhat rude) question is, as the son of a very attractive tennis and pop star and a very attractive former model, why is Joakim Noah so ugly?

Of brackets.

So, I filled out two NCAA brackets this year. First, I filled one out on Facebook, for fun. Then I did some research, looked at a bunch of predictions from various ESPN sports people, and filled out another bracket on Yahoo in order to participate in my office pool. As I was doing it, I wasn't sure that it was such a good idea, so I kept my original bracket on Facebook so that I could compare at the end and see which one had more points.

The end result:

Facebook - 1/4 with the Final Four, called Ohio State to win it all (wrong), 89 total points.
Office pool - 3/4 with the Final Four, called Florida to win it all (right), 161 total points.

So, I vaguely embarrassed myself to any Facebook friends who might have noticed that my original bracket sucked. But on the plus side, I came in first in my office pool. I'll take $300 over my Facebook dignity any day. I guess it's good I did my research.