Familial tribes made up of all kinds of people

Thank you Pixar employees for sharing your personal story of being gay, lesbian, bi and trasngender - as one person stated "not everyone is Kurt from Glee" - empathy is an amazing resource.
http://www.sweetney.com/sweetney/2010/11/your-feel-good-moment-this-morning.html

collection of film inspired by poetry

Suggested collection for a weekend film blitz.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5709

Among the list is the scene suggested from Four Weddings and a Funeral -  Although only one scene contains poetry, the recitation of "Funeral Blues" by W. H. Auden is one of the film's most memorable moments. A moving elegy to a dead lover, the poem begins "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone" and can be found in Auden's Collected Poems.

love in the world

Short clip inspired by the movie Love Actually (2003): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkjyRU3dLXU

My fondest memories of family are arriving/leaving airports because of the love I carry within, there and back.

Running for the bus

urban sprinting does burn caloris if only for five blocks - it takes extreme muscle control to not spill your latte, ensure proper footing, calculating distance vs. time x speed, some hopping required, keep your outfit in it's place and look divine doing it. I'd like to see that as part of a workout video!

Testimonios

Testimonios


Chicana feminists Saldivar-Hull (2000), Anzaldua (1997), Hurtado (2003) and the Latina Feminist Group (2001) emphasize that Latinas’ testimonios within academia are necessary “to critique those official versions of reality …and the feminist literature we read,…rose out of the same mass phenomenon of truth telling from personal knowledge (Latina Feminist Group, 2001, p. 29).” The Latina Feminist Group (2001) frames the importance of the testimonio in academic writings because

testimonio is often seen as a form of expression that comes out of intense repression or struggle, where the person bearing witness tells the story to someone else, who then transcribes, edits, translates, and publishes the text elsewhere … an effort by the disenfranchised to assert themselves as political subjects … in the process to emphasize particular aspects of their collective identity (p. 13).”

End of Life Care

excerpt:
In talking to clinicians about why we so often fail to be effective at the end of people’s lives, I was often told: My patients expect too much. Their families are unrealistic. They’re in denial.



But I came to think: isn’t that just human nature? Isn’t that how I would be when I’m told I have an incurable heart condition or cancer? It seems to me our job in medicine is to just deal with it. If we have to wait for people to stop yearning for the long tail—for the lottery ticket—in order to help them, we will be hurting a lot of people for a long time to come. Instead, we need to become more effective in using the techniques that experts already have for walking people through these moments in their lives.







Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/ask/2010/07/questions-for-gawande.html#ixzz0wLcIUgw5

In honor of overturning Prop 8 in California!!

A federal judge in California ruled today that the state's same-sex marriage ban amounts to unconstitutional discrimination and should be immediately struck down.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/california-gay-marriage-ruling-due-appeal-expected/story?id=11322255


West Wing episode:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHaVUjjH3EI

Keith Oberman - historical clip commentary on the passage of Prop. 8:

http://video.yahoo.com/watch/3902569/10624974

Summer Reading

choose a theme - read two/three books and compare - for example women writers of Latin American, or writers of 1940s, or mediterranean writers? modern or not so... then google and see what comes up. I was reading African novelist for a while or novels set in Africa both the black - and white-African perspective - three suggestions: I do not come to you by chance OR Coming to birth with Let's not go to the dogs tonight - mix and match...