As I write this, I can’t help thinking how very strange it all was. It was chance that led me to walk along the road to P.C.L. and, in so doing, the road to becoming a film director, yet somehow everything that I had done prior to that seemed to point to it as an inevitability. I had dabbled eagerly in painting, literature, theater, music, and other arts and stuffed my head full of all the things that come together in the art of the film. Yet I had never noticed that cinema was the one field where I would be required to make use of all I had learned. I can’t help wondering what fate had prepared me so well for this road I was to take in life. All I can say is that the preparation was totally unconscious on my part.
Interview with Naomi Klein at #OccupySF (by ekai)
subtle results of the Occupy gatherings:
- people of different walks and backgrounds are connecting with each other in the physical world and finding solidarity where in the past they may have focused on smaller differences. this is in contrast to the isolation many feel in modern America.
- a gift economy of services (like health care) and goods (I just read an RV was donated to #OccupySF as a mobile kitchen) has emerged, an extension of this solidarity
this feels like a long haul movement that, in contrast to the tea party, is grounded in a more authentic expression of our humanity — caring about one another. it also reminds me of burning man. excited to see how this develops. it’s clearly the beginning.
Source: youtube.com
Three years after the financial industry nearly caused a second Great Depression, our nation’s top universities remain the primary training and recruiting grounds for these same reckless institutions. This is antithetical to the civic mission and responsibility of higher education, and it is time for the academic community to seriously address this problem.
“Stop the Wall Street Recruitment”, a Stanford Daily op-ed that drew the attention of the Times
(via @kanyimaq)
http://pegobry.tumblr.com/post/11172033415
But even lesser ambitions will often be costly. Anything really worth doing will take a lot of your time and energy, probably more than most people are willing to give. Which I why I don’t think commencement addresses ought to come in the “Follow your dream” flavor; or when they do, then the message needs to be “Follow your dream, but don’t be under any illusions about how hard it will be to achieve. Prepare to pay a heavy price. And you had better be ready to stop from time to time to count the cost, to decide whether the dream-following you’re doing today is something you’re deeply going to regret some years down the line.” Commencement addresses shouldn’t be discouraging, but they shouldn’t offer empty encouragement either.
Fantastic comments by @pegobry on Steve Jobs’ oft-cited Stanford speech; emphasis mine.
Source: news.stanford.edu
Amit is an amazing dude. If you’re of South Asian descent, please join the bone marrow registry (it takes a simple cheek swab).Two weeks ago I got a call from my doctor, who I’d gone to see the day before because I’d been feeling worn out and was losing weight, and wasn’t sure why.
He was brief: “Amit, you’ve got Acute Leukemia. You need to enter treatment right away.”
I was terrified. I packed a backpack full of clothes, went to the hospital as he’d instructed, and had transfusions through the night to allow me to take a flight home at 7am the next day. I Googled acute leukemia as I lay in my hospital bed, learning that if it hadn’t been caught, I’d have died within weeks.
—
I have a couple more months of chemo to go, then the next step is a bone marrow transplant. As Jay and Tony describe below, minorities are severely underrepresented in the bone marrow pool, and I need help.
A few ways to help:
- If you’re South Asian, get a free test by mail. You rub your cheeks with a cotton swab and mail it back. It’s easy.
- If you’re in NYC, you can go to this event my friends are putting on.
- If you know any South Asians (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, or Sri Lanka), please point ‘em to the links above.
*NEW* Organize a donor drive near you (the most helpful thing you could possibly do!) email 100kcheecks@gmail.com. They’ll send you kits, flyers, tell you what to say, and make the whole process easy cheesy.
My friend Amit Gupta founded my favorite photography site Photojojo. A few weeks ago, he was diagnosed with leukemia. Amit is one of the nicest, most genuine, most creative people you could ever meet. Prior to founding the awesome Photojojo, he also co-founded Jelly in 2006 in NYC, a coworking community, that’s now spread to 60 cities across the world and helped spark the coworking revolution. It looks like Amit will need a bone marrow transplant quite soon. We can help him with that.
Unlike blood transfusions, finding a genetic match for bone marrow that his body will accept is no easy task. The national bone marrow registry has 9.5 million records on file, yet the chances of someone from South Asian descent of finding a match are only 1 in 20,000.
This is where we come in. We’re going to destroy those odds.
How? By finding and registering as many people of South Asian descent as we possibly can.
Tests are easy– a simple swab of the cheek. If you’re a match, the donation involves an outpatient procedure. It’s not fun, but it’s not dangerous either. And doing it could save a life.
We are encouraging anyone of South Asian descent to take a test to see if you’re a match.
You can get a free test by mail, or, if you’re in New York, you can join us Friday, October 14th for a special party to rally support.
We’ll have test kits on hand at the party, as well as music, booze, and maybe even a photo booth. It will, for the first time, combine a House 2.0-style party with a New Work City-style party, and if you’ve ever been to either, you know they are always something special.
Please spread the word and please do everything you can to help Amit beat leukemia. He’s a superstar.
Much thanks to Tony and pals for organizing this event, and EVERYONE who’s been tweeting and reblogging.
Please help get the word out any way you can. My life quite literally depends on it.
Source: jayparkinsonmd
Thanks.
I love Elon Musk
- Wired.com: How do you maintain your optimism?
- Musk: Do I sound optimistic?
- Wired.com: Yeah, you always do.
- Musk: Optimism, pessimism, fuck that; we're going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I'm hell-bent on making it work.
Source: Wired
Granted, 9 to 5 is how you survive,
I ain’t tryin to survive,
I’m tryin to live it to the limit and love it a lot
David was six feet two, and on a good day he weighed two hundred pounds. He had dark eyes, soft voice, caveman chin, a lovely, peak-lipped mouth that was his best feature. He walked with an ex-athlete’s saunter—a roll from the heels, as if any physical thing was a pleasure. He wrote with eyes and a voice that seemed to be a condensed form of everyone’s lives—it was the stuff you semi thought, the background action you blinked through at supermarkets and commutes—and readers curled up in the nooks and clearings of his style. His life was a map that ends at the wrong destination. He was an A student through high school, he played football, he played tennis, he wrote a philosophy thesis and a novel before he graduated from Amherst, he went to writing school, published the novel, made a city of squalling, bruising, kneecapping editors and writers fall moony- eyed in love with him. He published a thousand-page novel, received the only award you get in the nation for being a genius, wrote essays providing the best feel anywhere of what it means to be alive now, accepted a special chair to teach writing at a college in California, married, published another book, and hanged himself at age forty-six.
Who was David Foster Wallace?, people often [1] ask me.
From now on, I might refer them to this profile here in the afterword to David Lipsky’s “Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself”. Really enjoyable read; you get a lot of insight into the author’s early life and the kinds of things he thought about on a day-to-day basis. Highly recommended for fans of DFW.
[1] Not really, it’s happened like once, but I thought it sounded good to write.
