it’s nice out. 75 and not a cloud in the light blue sky. mexicans in sombrero hats laboring away at some duplex structure next door. backyard smells like shit, chairs have accumulated dirt over the who knows how many years. and speaking of dirt, the lawn has more dirt than grass, probably around 65/35 dirt to grass. 

you know, sometimes, when people are arguing about something really insignifcant? i mean, pretty much anything that isn’t central to you seems insignificant anyways, but you know what i mean, those really insignificant arguments. what is the issue of physically putting your hands on someone? “all bets are off, as long as you don’t touch me.” hmmmmm

By Shante Cosme

You know those ‘getting to know you’ chats, those dreaded, always awkward first date conversations that are limited by unfamiliarity, often falling victim to stifled Q&A sessions? Where did you grow up? Do you have any brothers and sisters? What do you do for fun? And eventually, you will come upon that unavoidable, quintessential question: what do you do? If by chance, this person admits to being a writer, think long and hard about going on another date. Or, at the very least, be aware of what you’re getting yourself into.

Dating a writer can either be a cruel card dealt out by fate’s unsympathetic hand or a complex game of wild card poker, although difficult to master, can leave you wading in metaphorical riches for the rest of your life. Regardless, it will be an often exciting and always unpredictable game.

Dating a writer means embracing the idea that almost everything is draped in symbolism. It means having to endure drawn out, sometimes incomprehensible metaphors, such as likening Chinese food to a respite for the soul, comparing drunken chats as way to cast light into Plato’s Cave and using almost every minor, passing detail as  ”a sign” of whatever they’re trying to convince you of.

Dating a writer means having to endure creative spins on their mistakes, flaws and fears. It means buying into their insistence that their angry tirades are a healthy expression of their ID and should therefore be embraced or having to accept their use of Buddha’s maxim of “the extinction of desire” as an excuse to turn down a request for oral sex. You should be aware of the clever turns of phrase they might wield to nullify your arguments, their keen ability to twist your words so that the meaning has completely changed and their unique skill of turning the tables so quickly in the light of their own mistakes that you will forget they committed any sin in the first place. Writers can be tricky like that.

Dating a writer means having to repeat yourself often. Writers are bad listeners and you will always be competing with the background noise of their thoughts, which are wild, rampant, and prone to racing at high velocities.

Dating a writer means having to quell the jealousies and irrational fears that arise when they disappear for hours on end. Resist the urge to send out a search team.  All writers possess the rare ability to vanish for hours in a coffee shop or bookstore.  Forgive them for not answering your text messages, BBM pings, phone calls and carrier pigeons. They were just in the middle of unloading an epiphany into their Moleskin.

Dating a writer means accepting the fact that every conversation, whether it be about World Peace or Heidi Klum’s gravity defiant cleavage, can become a story idea.  It means that no relationship issue, whether it be your sexual shortcomings or your attachment to your mother, is off limits for their next piece. Dating a writer means knowing there is always a running commentary  of your relationship somewhere, rich in detail and irony, whether it be on a hidden blog or in a ink-soaked journal hidden under their bed.

When you’re dating a writer, every moment, every seemingly insignificant milestone becomes imbued with meaning. There is no one better to watch a sunset with.  While a less literary-inclined person might observe the sun setting and simply remark upon its beauty or the color of the sky, a writer will describe the scene with adjectives you’ve never heard spoken aloud, causing your heart to beat a little faster and your skull to open just a little bit wider. You will remember this sunset forever.

When you’re dating a writer, every important occasion will artfully unfold under their orchestration. Anniversaries, birthdays and holidays are intricately plotted in their minds months in advance.  Every detail is attended to, the setting is always carefully chosen, each moment painstakingly constructed to bring you pleasure and happiness. There will be an arc to every instant, a thought behind every gesture and a climax for every circumstance. And though you may not fully comprehend the effort put forth, you will remember how special it all felt, how it somehow meant so much.

When you’re dating a writer, you will always feel beautiful under their gaze.  Ex-lovers may have complimented you on your eyes or your strong shoulders or your breasts, but a writer who loves you will see an allure in you that you never knew existed. They will notice your perfectly formed clavicle, describe a splotchy birthmark as heart-shaped, tell you your freckles are like constellations they want to make wishes on, and admit to wishing they could burrow into the small of your back. They will unearth a world of charms you never knew you had and you will feel flawless in their eyes.

Dating a writer means every gesture is steeped in nuance. Life’s ups and downs becomes subtle undulations, every seemingly meaningless twist of fate becomes narrated and illustrated, a plot point of a story that is always unfolding, and you are one of its most colorful characters. The mundanity of everyday life regularly becomes illuminated and infused with with substance and unexpected passion.

Dating a writer can mean all of these things, or none of these things, but it will certainly mean this: grammatical critiques of your text messages.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you. 

3 o’ clock. questionably straight people making gay jokes, cool? 

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — Every now and then, a new career path seizes the imagination of the global elite. Today it is social enterprise, in which earnest, problem-solving elites devote themselves to social causes, using the ethos and methods of business.

In the 2000s, investment banking and consulting had a near-duopoly on the top I.Q.’s. We saw how that went. Now those I.Q.’s are gravitating to challenges like growing mushrooms in discarded coffee grounds, allowing strangers to lend each other money online and keeping babies warm with heatable wax.

The phenomenon is starkest in M.B.A. programs. The proportion of M.B.A.’s among the applicants to Teach for America, for example, tripled between 2007 and 2010, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. At Harvard Business School, the Social Enterprise Club has become one of the largest student organizations, with more than 400 members. B-schools are adding electives in education and sustainability to keep up with their students.

Social entrepreneurs import the business world’s obsession with results. They use spreadsheets and PowerPoint to attack poverty and disease. They follow the 80-20 rule, focusing on small interventions with large consequences.

These organizations fulfill bright people because their missions reflect the average human being’s complex blend of altruism and selfishness. We want to save the world, profit from it and feel smart, all at once.

“This new generation wants to work on today’s toughest problems in part to do good and, just as important, because those issues present some of the most intellectually challenging issues we face as a world,” said Jacqueline Novogratz, the founder of Acumen Fund, a nonprofit venture fund that invests in social entrepreneurs.

The logic of both-and — as opposed to either-or — is prevalent in this field. Social entrepreneurs tend to believe that problems can be solved to the benefit of all. In their ideal world, money makers make their money, the poor are rescued from poverty, elites find meaning, and governments are circumvented.

In its early days, social enterprise was well-served by earnestness, which kept problem-solvers focused on the possible in a world full of impossibilities. But now, having gained influence, it may be time that the field reconsiders.

What earnest social enterprise can sometimes ignore is power, predation and good old-fashioned politics.

Social entrepreneurs see problems much as economists see them: as simple inefficiencies. Sometimes, indeed, inefficiency alone is involved — for example, mushroom growers not having access to discarded coffee grounds. But in many other situations, the problem is politics, which is to say the clashing interests of people.

Many social entrepreneurs treat power as something to work around. They can be clearer in articulating what they are for than in stating what they oppose, and why. They often take the holes of the system as a given and do their best to plug the leaks.

When I put that notion to Rebecca Onie, the chief executive of Health Leads, a social enterprise that trains college students to operate as social workers in U.S. clinics and hospitals, she pushed back and offered an explanation: Ideally, the government would fund the kind of social work she provides. It does not. Rather than fight the government, her group is making the “business case” for the usefulness of social workers, by demonstrating what works and collecting data on it.

Likewise, in poorer countries like India, social entrepreneurs address real needs — bringing solar lamps to villages, teaching women to weave shawls and connecting them to big-city markets. But the elites attracted to such projects are often less interested in combating the underlying structural problems. The villages need solar lamps because the government fails to bring electricity. The women must weave from home because their husbands forbid them to leave.

These problems are not inefficiencies in need of smoothing. They are fights in need of picking. But picking fights is rarely the social entrepreneur’s way.

In the United States, social entrepreneurs have flocked to education, which they say is the key to sustaining American competitiveness. But they have tended to work from the outside, building charter schools beyond the public system rather than taking on the hard but unavoidable politics of improving schools while easing thousands of ineffective teachers out.

When a member of their spreadsheet-wielding tribe, Michelle A. Rhee, actually got involved with politics, by becoming schools chancellor in Washington, she arguably cost the mayor an election and was just as quickly out of a job. That is perhaps why people stay away.

Leslie Crutchfield, the author of “Do More Than Give” and an expert on the field, suggested that activism was part of the learning curve for social enterprises. “Sometimes it takes a while for social entrepreneurs to recognize that such activism is required,” she told me. However, she added, once they do, the best of them are “relentlessly focused on changing the underlying system while also trying to alleviate symptoms.”

The avoidance of politics by many social entrepreneurs would not matter if politics abounded in people as bright, sincere and intelligent as they. But it does not.

Politics needs their verve and their drive, whether they serve in government itself or pick fights from the outside. It needs their spreadsheets, but it also demands their sense of battle. There is a case to be made for the importance of not being earnest.

(Source: The New York Times)

how do i justify all the seemingly terrible things that i’ve done with my actual intentions regarding each action?