eveninghawk’s links

There are things that we can all learn from other people. For me, being abroad doesn’t mean that I can’t continue to learn, that I can’t do my market research, or that I can’t network. It just means that I have to find a different way to do it, and I have a different sense of community.

So… for those of you who might be interested, these are the communities I take part in.

Dreaming In Ink: this is a small writing group that has a limited memberlist. Regardless, if you’re interested you should submit an application. We always like to see new faces.

Evolution: this is another online writing group that is open to anyone who is open, if you catch my drift.

Nightingale’s Lamp: an offshoot of sheroes, this is a network of people who are and are supportive of women of all ages and all walks of life.

Comixpedia: a comic person’s resource. This one is very new for me, but I love it so far.

Wet Canvas: an online artists’ resource and community.

So those are the ones that I find relevant to me and most certainly worth checking out.

My friend Andre made a really good comment of late. I like words, I like knowing the meanings of words, and I understand his frustration with the deviation from words’ importance, in this case the word “soul.” So, if you would humor him, you would use it less:

The use of the word soul is, to me, a perfect example of the cheapening of rich spiritual understanding. People talk about souls with such ease. It’s a throwaway word. And yet the actual word is not. Christians use “soul” quite a lot, but Jesus didn’t. Jesus was a Jew, and the concept of “soul” comes from greek. The hebrew concept is embodied in our word “spirit”. …

This all may strike you as word games. If so, it only exemplifies the extent to which we’ve denigrated language, and how far we are from art and language as a place. If there is a symbol of spiritual sickness, it is the way the word “soul” gets thrown around like a cheap rubber ball. …As if to prove that the word and the idea really are the same, the idea becomes cheap, and then people walk around asking why they don’t feel spiritually connected. Link to the whole thing

I highly suggest reading the whole thing, as it’s very well laid out.

Randy Milholland has reminded me yet again why I want to launch a webcomic come fall. Also, I have two new reads to keep me busy, and realized that I really ought to research my market much much more.

The other thing I have realized is that I’m dead tired, but getting a good laugh has done wonders for my being awake and able to write this post. Lesson? If you have a late all-nighter and start dropping off, while wasting a little time, you may be upping your productivity by reading the funnies. Happy people are more productive people, mr. manager.

So, the nuggets of joy should you choose to peruse:

goats ~ kinda neat, kinda crazy, kinda weird… very in your face in a fun way that I just love.

diesel sweeties ~ pixelated romance, and robots.

Go forth and laugh, good people. You need it.

Some folks I know over at Nightingale’s Lamp have been chatting about this post on the web called Memos to Americans. Call me a hippy, call me a liberal, call me an anti-American, but I agree with a whole lot of the sentiments going on here. Here are my thoughts:

It’s funny… I didn’t see this post so much as bashing america, as bashing the things that come out of people’s mouths that actually make it a dangerous thing to say I’m american.

Not only that, but I see the growing droves of people who come back here to China due to a whole mountain of reasons.

Also… folks from all walks of life who do manage to come to America get grilled with all kinds of nastiness when they come to the US, even if they are only staying as students. The INS is not exactly the most friendly department, even for our Canadian neighbors.

Heck, at the moment I have to watch my step here as retaliation for screening Chinese folks so heavily, and my Chinese friends in the US can’t visit family why? nothing to do with the Chinese government this time. It’s because the US will hold them up before letting them back. Funny thing for folks working on things like cancer research, you’d think they’d be welcome.

One of the things I like about the post is that it reflects a little bit of a global perspective, and it echoes things I hear from folks from other countries, not just Americans. Why? Because we aren’t the only democrats, we aren’t the only “free” country, we aren’t the police, and we seldom see other people’s cultures within the US, nevermind the rest of the world. The US isn’t perfect, though many people get very hurt and very angry for believing some of the PR. The most angry anti-american non-americans I know are people who have lived in the US, people who have lots of personal experience to speak from, it’s hard not to listen to that.

It’s hard when this is added to questions from my students when they try to unravel conflicting historical information, and when they try to understand “modern english” in various news clips. Even my littlest students want to know what they did to be so “dangerous” and to stand so near to the “axis of evil.” Why? Because they don’t see anything else from US news. It takes a lot of effort to convince my students that Americans won’t think they’re dangerous on sight, and won’t shoot them with a gun, and that’s equally true for my students from grade 1 through university.

Love to hear folks’ thoughts on this one.

We’re closing in on the one year anniversary of Nina Simone’s passing. Do you know who she is? I think you should. There are lots of people who we don’t know, don’t remember, don’t educate ourselves about.

Jazz and blues are movements I think that every American at least should bother trying to get some grasp of, if for nothing else than to have a modicum of cultural understanding… American music history holds ties to every major issue that has gone on in the history of the country, so while you can jam and listen to things you can also get a clue. I think this is important, and I think it will influence my choices in teaching at ESP in the future.

So today, my little thought is to spread a little knowledge of Nina Simone out there. Why? Because she was an amazing creator of music, she got fed up with the US and left, not only because of how people who were culturally “other” saw her, but also because of the way black people acted towards her. She was a civil rights activist, and a very smart opinionated woman who made an amazing amount of music. She’s somone we should learn from.

So, here are your resources for self education:

Nina Simone Web be careful, the home links in the pages don’t work

Nina Simone - The Official Web Site

Nina Simone: Break Down and Let it All Out

After reading various sources of praise, I decided to check out kinja. I do like it because it gives me more of what I want in a newsreader, which is just to pull it all together from different sources according to date… only I won’t stick Boing Boing on there since it would just fill everything up. So I am trying out using different sources to read different things, thus optimizing my newsfeeding. Hrmm… I wonder if that will be a new verb…

newsfeed: v. the act of using newsfeeds to keep updated on information, usually seen by the speaker as a rather compulsive need to stay informed in an up-to-the-second manner; a typical habit in the blogging community.

The other fun thing about Kinja is that I can share my digest with all you wonderful readers… all 3 of you.