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daysiias · 5 years ago

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{ zendaya ♔ 24 ♔ she/her } well, well, well if it isn’t daysia collins running around peach hollow. legend has it, they come from tangerine towers and have lived here for six years. if you’re wondering what they’ve been up to, i hear they’re a crisis counselor for a living. they have been known to be quixotic yet nurturing. a word of advice to them, always look over your shoulder. you never know who is watching. { kim ♔ 25 ♔ est ♔ she/her }

yall know me. i’m kim, i play serenity, and i’m one of the admins!! this is my damaged but optimistic baby, daysia. ITS PRONOUNCED LIKE DEJA VU :’) i just created her in november but she so quickly became my favorite muse to write. so buckle up! and pls plot w me. i am fragile and if i don’t get any plots i will hide in a dumpster, where i belong.

TW FOR DEATH, DRUG USE, ALCOHOLISM, CAR ACCIDENT

here is her pinterest and a spotify playlist if you wanna check those out ~

daysia jade, day, dj, deej – anything goes. she’s 23 and will turn her head to just about anything. she’s a spring baby born march, 1996.

her childhood was pretty good. she and her brother grew up a year apart, and her parents divorced early. early enough that daysia can barely remember a time where the family was hole, and likes it that way.

however, her father did not take the divorce well and turned to drugs – meth to be specific. he only saw the kids on weekends and even then, daysia and marcus absolutely knew what was happening. perhaps they didn’t know his choice of poison, but they knew that it was just that: poison.

he was never abusive and always took care of the kids, even if he was tweaking out of his mind. there were a few instances that were touch and go, like when he forgot to take dinner out of the oven and it caught fire, or when he forgot to change the sheets – little things that added up.

when daysia was 16 and marcus was 15, they were involved in a car accident. her dad was high behind the wheel, lost control of the car, and they hit the guard rail. they went over an embankment and down a short hill before the vehicle came to a complete stop, flipped over. she watched the life drain from her brother’s face, and never got into a car again, up until recently when she started letting @malcolmvramsey drive her places she needed to go. she always tries to give him gas money, but he rarely takes it.

a good deal of resentment built up for her father, but she remained stoic, even when he went to prison for drug charges and the dui he’d racked up that ultimately killed her brother. she didn’t let anyone know that she was hurting, because she numbed it all. she threw herself into her school work and her artwork, painting constantly. melting colors together somehow helped her cope. she could get her emotions out on paper. in fact, that still rings true today. in her bedroom of the apartment she lives in, she has covered one of the walls in canvas and paints over and over.

in an effort to start life over, daysia left detroit when she graduated high school. she transferred to peach hollow where she went to winchester university, not wanting a lot of attention. this is where she really came to life.

daysia was able to push michigan to the back of her mind entirely, because peach hollow had so much to offer. the people were better. the music was better. the parties were better. the education was better. there wasn’t a single thing she missed from home aside from her mother, who she kept in regular contact with and still does. they’re always texting and facetime before bed every night.

she came alive. college changed her. she was studying a subject that interested her and meeting people who didn’t have to know about her past. she did, and does everything to keep michigan her dirty little secret. she liked the party scene, but only drank or smoked weed. she refuses to touch anything that might turn her into her father. she was even hired on as a crisis counselor for a local hotline, contractual to her graduation.

in the past month, daysia has plummeted, however. nobody would ever be able to tell. she is the queen of poker face, an absolute delight to be around. she can be a little aloof, and is constantly stoned, but it’s how she gets through the day. she is an absolute goof, loves to crack jokes and make people laugh. she loves to laugh herself. these are all traits that show and cover the inner turmoil constantly trying to bubble to the surface.

about three weeks ago, daysia received word that her father passed away in jail. he overdosed, and she wasn’t sure how to feel. so she didn’t. she did, however, stop doing school work and started drinking more. she’s mere days from flunking out of school and losing her job. but nobody knows, because she acts like she doesn’t know either.

all in all, she’s doing a lot of self sabotage but covering it up with every ounce of grace she has.

as for her personality and relationships, daysia excels. she is nurturing, so when a friend, or even a stranger is hurting, she tends to go to their side and comfort them. as long as she can make them laugh, then everything will be okay. she makes friends pretty easily, and keeps them for the most part. she is fiercely loyal and will absolutely scrap to defend her loved ones.

she loves love. there is no gender she isn’t curious about and absolutely loves romance, though she also tries to hide that. her walls are ten feet tall. she’s in to hook ups, flings, and polyamory. she’s very open in that sense!!

FUN FACTS

she has an english bull dog named frank!! he is her pride and joy. she dresses him up in outfits, has regular photo shoots with him and loves going to the dog park. he isn’t legally an emotional support animal, but that’s definitely what he is to her. if he doesn’t like you, she won’t either tbh

she has this lil purple pen looking thing that is always on her. it’s her weed vape and she will hit it anywhere. her dumb head is always in the mfing clouds

she has a spotify family plan that is currently only her, mac, and dom and she will absolutely invite anyone she meets bc spotify premium is something everyone should enjoy

wears a lot of graphic tees and jeans, kinda a tom boy. doesn’t love dressing up but will occasionally. also doesn’t rly like make up but DOES know how to beat her face

1000% unable to be alone for like any period of time?? like if she gets off work and no one is in her apartment she just leaves. she goes next door to mac, goes to the peach pit, anywhere she can socialize. being left to her own thoughts will always turn out poorly.

really loves poetry. cannot write it to save her life, but loves going to slam readings or checking out poetry books from the library. her adhd brain can’t handle novels – poetry is just the right length to keep her attention and dig into her soul.

oh yeah, she’s got some pretty intense untreated adhd lol

OK SO WANTED CONNECTIONS IF UR STILL HERE LMAO

ex-roommate: something happened between daysia and this person, whether it was a relationship gone wrong, a friendship with tension, or just the other person being a damn slob – and daysia removed them from the house and moved someone new in. they are probably on shitty terms.

roomate(s): ^^ the forementioned current roommate or two!! i would like her to be veeeery close to whoever lives here. they have to be ok with her dog, her weed, and how mf needy she is.

current flings: a few people are probably on her list of suitors right now. people she spends time with romantically, but hasn’t committed to. she absolutely cannot be alone, at any point… ever! so, she has someone with her at all times. m/f/nb, all good.

party friends: this one is pretty self explanatory!! these are friends that daysia may or may not talk to outside of a party, but will always cling to at one.

close friends: she lets very few people all the way in, but those that make it are generally taken care of by day. she makes sure that they are as comfortable with life as possible and spends a lot of time with them

exes: as daysia is a ticking time bomb, there have been many people she’s blown off. whether they once hooked up, were together, or what have you, daysia has a lot of exes. she never means to hurt anyone. it just sort of happens and she has accepted it.

#peaches:intro #i'm back lmao

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daycollins · 4 years ago

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{ zendaya ☁ twenty six ☁ she/her } among the whispers around peach hollow, have you heard of daysia collins? no? well, let’s catch you up to speed. rumor has it, she’s been seen strolling around blueberry boulevard & have lived in peach hollow for six years. it’s good to have her around because i hear she’s a crisis counselor for a living. recent events must have her trembling because it hasn’t be long since everyone found out she flunked school. let’s hope they learned their lesson that the truth always catches up to you.

yall know me. i’m kim, i play winnie, and i’m one of the admins!! this is my damaged but optimistic baby, daysia. ITS PRONOUNCED LIKE DEJA VU :’) i just created her in november but she so quickly became my favorite muse to write. so buckle up! and pls plot w me. i am fragile and if i don’t get any plots i will hide in a dumpster, where i belong.

TW FOR DEATH, DRUG USE, ALCOHOLISM, CAR ACCIDENT

here is her pinterest and a spotify playlist if you wanna check those out ~

daysia jade, day, dj, deej – anything goes. she’s 23 and will turn her head to just about anything. she’s a spring baby born march, 1996.

daysia received word that her father passed away in jail. he overdosed, and she wasn’t sure how to feel. so she didn’t. she did, however, stop doing school work and started drinking more. she flunked out of school and lost her job.

at the same time, she got into her first serious relationship. day fell hard and fast for her best friend, mac. their relationship started out much like a fairy tale. she wanted to keep it like that forever, but her addiction and ptsd took over. she tried her very hardest to hold onto mac, but he moved back to nyc with their best friend, dom, in tow. she still misses them to this day and finds it hard to keep friends like she kept them close. the littlest things will remind her of mac and she’ll start to spiral. two years later and she’s still hung up, but she’ll deny it to the very end.

it’s safe to say that when this happened, daysia crumbled. she realized just how many people she’d lost and how many she had -- and she didn’t have anyone at that point, or so she thought. she continued to isolate and stopped answering her phone, and within the week, her mother was there to drag her home to detroit for detox.

she spent the next few weeks laying in the bathroom, going through withdrawal from alcohol and the various benzos she’d started eating like candy. things were bad. her mother never left her side, and after many na and aa meetings, after snatching pill bottles and miniatures out of her room for months, daysia cleaned up her act. she put on a healthy amount of weight, started working out, went to aa or na two or three times a day until she was comfortable enough to skirt by a day or two without one. she finished up her degree that summer and started waiting tables. she saved up every cent, finally having enough money and credit built up to buy a house where she really wanted to be: peach hollow.

after talking to her old boss, they agreed to take her back on as a crisis counselor when she moved back

so the newly clean and sober (aside from weed lol) daysia is living in a house on blueberry boulevard with @dawsonsawyer

FUN FACTS

she has this lil purple pen looking thing that is always on her. it’s her weed vape and she will hit it anywhere. her dumb head is always in the mfing clouds

she has a spotify family plan that is currently only her, mac, and dom and she will absolutely invite anyone she meets bc spotify premium is something everyone should enjoy

wears a lot of graphic tees and jeans, kinda a tom boy. doesn’t love dressing up but will occasionally. also doesn’t rly like make up but DOES know how to beat her face

oh yeah, she’s got some pretty intense untreated adhd lol

OK SO WANTED CONNECTIONS IF UR STILL HERE LMAO

party friends: this one is pretty self explanatory!! these are friends that daysia may or may not talk to outside of a party, but will always cling to at one.

#peachesintro

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rgr-pop · 6 years ago

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LONG POST AIRING GRIEVANCES ABOUT DUMB SHIT IN BEAUTY COMMUNITY!!

oh my GOD. okay, so, small youtuber who is climbing. beloved by many small youtubers because she is a regular girl and very nice and FROM UPSTATE NEW YORK and has social justice interests, she also posts a lot of drama content and some people (including me tbh) really like the way she kind of ~~democratizes drama content. don’t @ me it’s whatever. reddit HATES her because her mother buys her a lot of makeup for her birthday (literally) and she is not into self-punishing no-buys which is the only thing people like right now very coincidentally (going on a no-buy is apparently how you end landfills).

this youtuber is fat and not conventionally pretty--I really hate even saying the latter because it is objectively not true and also an evil thing to say even nicely, but for example she is always talking about how she doesn’t really care that her lips are small and is not interested in overdrawing or “fixing” them, and getting flamed for it. in the community (the respectable arm of it, which is the rddt, where we are ostensibly not allowed to be like “she looks terrible”), where there is smoke there is fire, and “not skilled at makeup” + maybe some nebulous complaints about whininess = she is a fat girl, end her. (”rude” = black youtuber too much power, end her.)

i’m talking about sm*key gl*w whose name is hannah, hannah #1, i think it is interesting to contrast her with the other hannah that i talk about sometimes--i try not to talk about her too much because we sort of teechnically have real world social connections and, also, i just feel bad for her. i feel desperately bad for hannah #2, because she is in her thirties having lived in art communities and global urban centers but for the first time in her life having to reckon with things like--”it is not appropriate to talk about calories at dinner, etc.” that is the second hannah, and while she is sweet and interesting to many in the small youtube community precisely because she is very alien to them (has mfa), it’s very difficult to watch, and sometimes i think she is the most “toxic” youtuber i follow. she is not an originator in any way, but she found herself in the center of a so-called anticonsumerist movement in small beautube that is kind of taking over, which is related to but not exactly minimalism--you have probably heard me talk about this already, at length. a good example of this is that second hannah recently said in a video that she was thinking of doing a shopping “fast.” i don’t know how she became this person, and how she held onto this kind of personality in spite of being in lots of communities that i am also in or have friends in where i know that if you talked this way about dieting etc. at a social event, someone would probably softly scold you. she somehow insulated herself from this kind of learning, i don’t know, then she threw herself into beautube where a woman who maybe sort of likes art and writes poetry and has heard of “fair trade” before is an absolute anomaly, but that community--like literally, where people do liposuction and skinny teas!--has only encouraged this absolutely unreal nasty and BAD behavior. etc. i have a lot of feelings about this.

so first hannah is a fat girl who is not rich--we will get to that!--but spends her money primarily on makeup. people HATE her. second hannah is thin, possibly rich in family origin (i think she is) but basically your average working artist in life. she frames her so-called overconsumption not even precisely as an addiction but specifically as a lack of willpower that she also struggles with when it comes to sometimes eating sugar (really). both of these hannahs consume and talk about quite a lot of luxury makeup--second hannah is very openly committed to luxury purchase as part of her self-conception. second hannah sometimes goes on “shopping diets” though, so people praise her! it is evil.

above is the shit i hate day in and day out but the points below will have more to do with the screencap +...upstate new york, i guess. henceforth we are only talking about first hannah.

so this girl is from some kind of small town around rochester or syracuse--something up there. iirc she goes to a suny school i had never heard of (i looked it up and it is a “suny comprehensive college,” though i can’t remember if she transferred out of this school to a bigger school. but, as many of you know, sunys are cheap as hell and should be protected at all costs, this school costs well under half what my state school did, for residents anyway.) she is in her mid-twenties and not graduated yet, due to struggles she has had (and spoken openly about) as well as having gone to community college. they LOVE to bring up how she is too old to be a college student! she’s like...idk 24 or something. she is going to school to be a social worker in one of those accelerated programs, which she has found quite difficult (again, spoken openly about this) and which also requires, as many of you know!, lots of extra work, unpaid and paid. she said somewhere that she does not have student loans, but i don’t know if her parents paid for her college or just shouldered loans, or if she paid for it, or if it is all financial aid. (”not having student loans” is something that enrages people, ESPECIALLY when someone doesn’t have loans because they got need-based aid.) again, she probably had some financial catastrophes due to school failures (speaking from experience here), but: sunys is cheap as hell and there are a million reasons why someone could go to one and not be struggling with loans!

where was i...her parents. watching this has fascinated me! her dad was a school teacher and her mom is a social worker--absolutely public servant middle class. i thiiink (could be wrong) that her father retired already and ended up retiring from a principalship, so they were probably extremely comfortable by the time she was in college, but they are definitionally middle class. the biggest controversy around this youtuber is that for birthdays and christmas her mother goes fucking insane--probably spent two to four hundred dollars on her for her birthday. she talks about this all the time: her mother and her are very close and their hobby is shopping. people treat this like the bougiest fucking thing on earth and it is ba nanas. straight up, this girl has probably never even HEARD of anthropologie. listen, i can’t afford to live like her either but i recognize poor shopping when i see it. working class people like to blow their money on bullshit and to take issue with that is demonstrably racist and classist! i will not hear this conversation over again in 2019. for example, hannah made a video about her “high end bag” collection, in which she said she got a bcbg bag on sale for like $30 but had never heard of the brand before. she had once been gifted a kate spade bag and her DREAM was to purchase one on her own. she buys coach at the local coach outlet, which is a regional attraction. THIS GIRL IS NOT BOUGIE! THEY ARE JUST MAD THAT SHE OWNS CLOTHES AND IS ALSO FAT! she did a closet tour where she talked about how she has like 50 crop tops, they were ALL like forever 21. they are just mad about fat girl in crop tops. there is nothing to see here! does she have too much shit, and shop too much? sure. welcome to flyover country you dumb bitches. that is what I think about that!

so, she definitely makes money on youtube, but mostly enough to sustain youtube and makeup buying (possibly some savings? unsure. i know she said this in a video but i forget.) she has lived with this boyfriend of hers for a number of years and they are building a life together that doesn’t immediately include marriage, probably largely for financial reasons. i get the sense that his jobs pay a lot of their bills, but he just finished getting a teaching MA of some kind (i think he is a math teacher? i already forgot) and is entering the regular teaching job market. based on some of the following i think his parents might be wealthier than hers but i think they might also be teachers. as you can see in the screenshot above, people are enraged at this girl for apparently being a gold digger for getting a house with him before they are married!

people are SO pissed that she was “able to buy a house” at age 25, but they did not watch the video! in which she said that they had been dealing with the death of her bf’s step grandpa all year, and the family had decided that they should take over the step grandpa’s house. (step grandpa’s family does sound “richer” because, according to her, this house had been owned by a GREAT grandparent and paid off decades ago.) her descriptions of this house are confusing to me because she keeps referring to it as both “old” and “from the eighties,”; I think it is an actually old house that had not been “updated” since the eighties. seems like the family did not “gift” it to them as much as sign it over to them in exchange for them being the ones to take out the renovation loans, which allegedly she said are $50k. unclear to me if she and her bf got approved for that loan--probably not, I think it was taken out in the family’s name. ($50k is too much to put into a house in rochester imooo but I am reserving my judgment there! rochester has a very flyover housing economy, much like ours, but with a much higher end, I think?)

so anyway, these vultures are sociopaths. “ Who gives someone a house no matter how much they like them? That seems wild to me” ...p-parents? dead grandparents? is your will gonna be like “my kid has to buy their OWN house like i did!” who are these people

YES SOMETIMES YOU STOP NEEDING YOUR HOUSE, WHEN YOU DIE

anyway I’m done. I just thought this thing would be of interest in particular to the upstate new yorkers. the whole condition of the indebted working-middle class is just like inconceivable to people who consume only ideologically pure content by wealthy west coast whites all day long

#makeupblogger fandom

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respecthbcus · 5 years ago

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Fatherhood By: Jaylen Amir Brown, Respect HBCUs Student Ambassador (Winston Salem State University)

What makes a man a man? Money, provision, integrity? Is it the ability to reproduce? Is it their sexual preference?

What is fatherhood? Is it continuing one’s bloodline? Enforcing discipline? Is it phone conversations, talks over dinner, weekend/holiday visits, or appearances during big game days?

As my twenty short years of life continue, the definition of fatherhood and manhood is one which is intriguing to me. I’ve spoke with several fathers around the world, receiving many different answers. I've come to the realization that it's not like a "cup". There is no concrete definition which every man lives by to know what is and isn't a cup. It's more so like recipes to food which are often changed here and based off personal likes and dislikes. These changes can be great and others can be rather distasteful. These changes are critical due to how powerful the influence a father can have on his child(ren).

I think we all can relate to the lack of male presence in the classroom. At least we are aware of this. Don’t forget to add Black and/or African American to the equation. Personally, I can count on one hand the number of those that fit into this category. Actually, two fingers. The opportunity of those in classrooms to give everyday guidance for a minimum of five days and seven hours a day can be worthwhile. Not to mention when the father or a positive male is missing. I found that number to increase as I transitioned to college. More surprisingly to me this was evident on campuses other than Winston-Salem State University. It was one of those things which I was aware of but first hand seeing the professor, faculty, and staff members who actually looked like me daily provided that reassurance. Although this number did increase significantly, nationally there is still only a small percentage present.

Growing up I was unaware how common it was in my area for children to not communicate with their father. Let alone know who he was. This was especially something many of my classmates had in common. For whatever reason it may have been, as I reflect back I realize the impact this caused and how problematic this is in the black community. It was an actual privilege for me to know my mother and father and an even bigger one to watch their love strengthen as I continue to spend more time living. My father taught me many things that my mother could not. His caring father perspective allowed for me to be immersed in understanding. I remember many times where I have been abled to witness my father serve as one of the positive male figure in the lives of others. He has been a true “step-father” to many while only being married once for twenty years (which continues to flourish shout out to my parents for twenty years this past Thursday June 13th).

So, what makes a man a true exemplifier of fatherhood? The question can be left for you to define at your own discretion. However, one can conclude for one to be a fatherhood he must put his child first, always be there in times of need, be a provider, and handle his business. So, to my fathers out there, those with kids and those without, thank you.

I had a chance to interview a few HBCU fathers. Scroll below to check out some of their awesome advice, insight, memories, stories, and thoughts on fatherhood. Check them out below!

Mr. Jimmie Lewis III, is a recent 2019 Prairie View A&M University Biology graduate from Katy, Texas. He is the father of two-year old twins, Mason & Marshall Lewis and is on the journey to become a Physician.

Q: What has been your greatest moment as a father?

A: I love that fatherhood has brought me back to all those simple pleasures I had long forgotten as a kid. I can now hold my own while watching hundreds of Disney movies and sing the words to hundreds of toddler tunes. I'm also proud to say the joys of playing hide-and-seek and follow the leader have finally returned to me as a 22 year old young man. However, as a new father I am most proud of watching my sons grow and learn. Being born prematurely early two years ago at the Longview Regional Hospital to now being very curious and knowledge during the terrible two year. I love being a witness to all their new lessons and discoveries.

Q: How did fatherhood impact you as a full-time or part-time college student?

A: If I were Picasso and had to paint a mural that would be representative of who I was, who I am, and who I will become it would be a harmony of colors. This painting would be a prolongation depicting yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The imagery behind my mural shows a story which is exclusively mine as I travel down the road of life. First impressions take less than thirty seconds. However, there was a time in my life when most people made their assumptions about me in less than ten seconds. Many strangers would declare both disappointment and lack of expectation, followed by condolences instead of congratulations. This was the reaction I received from a lot of individuals at first, therefore, I hid the fact for over two years that I had two twin sons while raising them to be exceptional young kings. I was a twenty-year-old father, a sophomore in college, a new father of twin sons, a stereotype to society.

A painter usually starts with the color blue. Blue represents the color of hope and dreams that I have fostered. However, all of a sudden, I felt as if the mortal error had been committed and everything that preceded it was embarrassing. Being young and naive, I use to care about others opinions, therefore I wouldn’t tell my peers or associates that I had sons. Growing as a better man and better father, my focus changed that allowed me to see my purpose as a young father.

Being an undergraduate scholar at Prairie View A&M University presented me with new challenges as a young parent during the beginning of my junior year of college. I wasn’t used to taking care of kids since most of my siblings and cousins are around my age. My life as a new father was marred by many obstacles that tested my strength and willingness to endure the uncertainty of what was to come. I did not think I fully grasped what it would be like, what it would mean, to be a new father for a greater part of my academic and social life. I had to study more during the week when I knew I would get my sons on the weekends and had to miss plenty of social gatherings due to my new responsibilities. In order to provide for my sons, I relied on my campus job, and financial support from my parents.

The color purple which represents self-awareness and realization on my mural also has an influence on my personal growth. It was imperative that I abandon all previous habits of yesterday because they cannot be incorporated into my sons’ futures and my goals as a young father and man as well. Tomorrow is colored gold for promise. Tomorrow is full of promises and opportunities. My aesthetic painting will never be finished in spite of the strong decisions of colors. I am carrying the torch that was passed to me; just like I walk in other’s footsteps, therefore my twin sons can have the possibility to pass the burning torch. This calling is who I am and what I aspire to be.

Q: I personally remember times when parents would have to bring their child with them to class and even ask their classmates to watch their child during class times. Has there ever been a time where you had to depend on your HBCU family to assist with your parenting?

A: I didn’t depend on my HBCU family a lot. I would say my immediate family on her side and my side has had the greatest influence on the boys. Without my parent’s wisdom and assistance, I wouldn’t be able to raise my sons by myself. I also applaud the mother for being an incredible mother to my sons. Her journey over the past 2 years hasn't been easy, yet she found the courage and resilience to keep moving forward. Many would have quit after transferring schools, becoming a new mommy of twins and working 3 jobs all at once. Yet, she stayed the course. And as much as I would like to take a lot of credit for my part in my sons lives, she has played the greatest role in my son’s lives since they are with her majority of the time.

Q: When it's finally time for Mason and Marshall to visit colleges and apply, how likely will you encourage them to attend an HBCU?

A: I will definitely persuade my children to attend the best HBCU in the land, Prairie View A&M University. Hopefully, they become future members of the Eta Gamma Chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc as well. HBCUs have a historic sense of community and family that makes the students feel more at home, therefore I want my sons to be comfortable and experience college just how I did.

Please share any advice you would give to soon to be fathers.

For future fathers, always be there for your children even during the worst circumstances. Fathers are apart of the critical point in the lives of our young African-American children. We must individually assess how we're raising them and figure out what we can do to keep our families intact (or at least how-to co-parent effectively). Also, always give your children a hug and tell them you love them everyday.

Mr. Oscar Ball III MS, OTR/L is from Goldsboro NC and the father of a beautiful daughter, Jayla. Oscar is a two-time graduate from Winston-Salem’s own Winston-Salem State University. In 2009, he received his B.S. in Exercise Science and in 2012 he continued on obtaining his Masters in Occupational Therapy.

Q: What has been your greatest moment as a father?

A: I don’t think I could take one single moment and define it as my greatest moment as a father. So many come to mind and I know there’s plenty more to come. I would have to say it just has to be the overall experience. My daughter gives me a reason to live and grind each and every day. Her smile lets me know everything is going to be ok. And just watching her shows me that if nothing else I know I’ve done one thing right.

Q: How did fatherhood impact you as a full-time or part-time college student?

A: I had my daughter right before I started a strenuous Master’s program at WSSU. It made me more focused and taught me the importance of balance. It made me stronger as a student because I knew I had to be for her even when I wanted to be weak. It gave me the grind to make it through and hustle to support her while in school.

A: I can’t really say I needed others help to support her. When I was in grad school her mom and I did a good job of co-parenting.

Q: Do you believe there was ever an instructor or faculty/staff member who assisted with you experience as a father? This can be from advice to make adjustments for you due to father duties.

A: If anything, the advice I received from Dr. Anne Jenkins about life and the importance of making an impact for myself and my family was the biggest motivation I received as a student that had an impact on me as a student.

Q: When it's finally time for your child to visit colleges and apply, how likely will you encourage Jayla to attend an HBCU?

A: I will strongly advise my daughter to attend an HBCU but will ultimately support whatever decision she chooses. I’m a firm believer that how I live and the way I share my experiences with her even now will mold and influence a lot of the decisions she will make going into adulthood including her choice of college. As of now, she’s already planning to attend WSSU as an education major.

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dvfense-blog · 6 years ago

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hey guys!!! i’m cj and i really told myself that i wasn’t going to play another hockey player muse but turns out,,, that was a big fat lie... so here i am with my boy ollie :)

connection: secret hook-up #1 faceclaim: cody christian character name: weston olivers ( aka ‘ollie’ ) age: 17 gender & pronouns: male, he/him clubs: hockey

HEADCANONS:

#1:

weston olivers called ollie almost his entire life had the benefit ( or curse ) of being born on the open road and not quite settling down. he and his younger brother maxwell were shuffled around the country throughout most of their young childhoods ( born in arizona, living everywhere from from alaska to minnesota to california ). being uprooted every year or two wasn’t easy, but the olivers boys learned to take it in stride --- ollie especially : this was his normal, he didn’t know anything else.

they never struggled greatly financially, though both boys were taught to remain humble and the importance of hardwork to get where you want to be. the one thing that stayed constant through the different homes, the different schools, was hockey. papa olivers coached ncaa and more recently an ahl team and instilled it in his sons to follow in that path, and follow it they did. houghton academy this past year is only the most recent stop in ollie’s life and he’s taking it as he always has, with a laidback ease even the most adaptable can be jealous of.

#2:

ollie has almost accidentally established himself toward the top of the middle tier bottom of the highest tier of the social pyramid. he’s long established an amiable and laidback sort of attitude that makes him easy to like. and let’s just say there’s a reason ollie has his eye set on the NHL --- he’s extremely good at what he does. the era of the offensive defenseman is here and he’s well on his way to being the very epitome of it.

he’s already got colleges trying to get him to graduate early, to sign their letters of commitment. and he’s desired not only in the college hockey scene but in the school scene too -- who wouldn’t want to get some of the hot mystery transfer student who can seriously play : it’s too bad he has little interest in being an a relationship. hook ups, sure, but his first love has always been and always will be the ice ; he’s practically allergic to romantic commitment so don’t read too much into that kiss. he’s left a few discontented and brokenhearted souls in his wake but he’s always been clear where he stands on such things, so it’s no fault but their own.

#3:

from the outside eye dante alvares and weston olivers had exactly the relationship you would expect from two star players on different sports teams. there was just the right amount of competitiveness, banter and snark, and maybe under all that the barest thread of respect for what the other did. ( to ollie maybe it was a bit more complicated than that, but he rarely let anyone know that ). he was under no impression that he was a threat to dante’s invisible crown, nor did he want it --- his eye was set on much loftier goals that didn’t factor in or require his social status in high school. ollie had his checkboxes : be the best on the team, be a good teammate, play for BU, get drafted, play in the NHL --- nowhere did that list involve annoying sports rivals.

MISC

--- ollie has been at houghton for almost one year now ( he transferred between his sophomore and junior year ). if he stays for the rest of his senior year through until he goes to college, this will be the longest since he can remember that he’s been in one place so long.

--- he has very strict loyalties : to his younger brother first and foremost, to his team second.

--- i definitely have more to add but i can’t think at the moment....

WANTED CONNECTIONS

--- i mean,,,,, all the crush plots,,,,,

--- crush turned close friendship?

--- maybe even someone he knew when he was little in ~some other~ place?

--- if you need to know one thing about me it’s that i’m really bad at wc... i get inspired by bios / intros so i will be taking a look soon

#ha.intro #intro #i'm going to go do hw now #but i'll be back

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thingscometogether · 4 years ago

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What I Can Say/What I Can’t Say: Bipolar Edition

One of the fun conundrums I get to face as someone with a mental illness is navigating polite conversation around the realities of my life.

Where did you go to school? What I Can Say: Oh, I graduated from Pitt. What I Can’t Say: It took me seven years and taking classes at four different schools in order to graduate from college. I started at a private liberal arts school which I hated and from which I had to take time off after my first breakdown. I decided to transfer to the University of Pittsburgh, which I loved. But while at Pitt I got so depressed I had to come home for a year and had to take classes at two local colleges in order to keep up with credits. I eventually returned to Pitt where I somehow managed to graduate with honors.

What did you study? Can Say: Italian Language and Literature Can’t Say: I wanted to double major in History and Italian with a minor in Linguistics or Art History, but it was hard enough to maintain even a minimum course load and I didn’t have the ability to manage much more than that. I was accepted into a graduate program for Italian but I wound up never attending because my life completely fell apart after graduation and by the time I managed to pull it together it was too late to attend.

What do you do? Can Say: I’m interested in serving people with disabilities or who face housing and food insecurity. Can’t Say: Having bipolar disorder makes it really hard for me to keep a job. When my cycles of depression and irregular sleep begin, it’s almost impossible to make sure I can get up for work every day. It’s hard to focus and the more stress I bear, the more exhausted I become and the more easily I become depressed. At that point, when I can barely get out of bed to eat or shower, the priority of maintaining a job flies out the window.

Do you have a boyfriend? Can Say: Better a dog than a boyfriend, haha. Can’t Say: How am I supposed to tell a guy I’m interested in that I have a major mental illness? Saying ‘Hey, by the way, I have bipolar disorder’ isn’t exactly something you reveal on a first date. Or a third. Or a fifth. And if I did build enough confidence to tell someone about my life -- about all the medications and hospitalizations and lost jobs and traumatic episodes -- the fear of him rejecting me would assuredly keep me from doing it. And if somehow that didn’t scare him off, actually allowing him to see me in a state of complete decompensation feels impossible. Too much vulnerability. Too much shame. I don’t even let my parents see me when I’m like that. So no, the dating field is too fraught with explosive landmines to merit a venture into being that exposed.

Do you have kids? Can Say: Nope. I think it’s an eventuality, but I’m not in a rush. Can’t Say: I’m scared to death of being a bad mother. What if I neglect them because I’m too depressed? What if the stress causes me to break down? I know people have trauma as young kids from having mothers who were depressed and didn’t attend to them. How will I explain to them what happens to Mommy when she goes into her room and doesn’t leave for three days? I don’t want my children to have to deal with the stress mental illness causes when I can’t deal with it myself sometimes. Worst of all, what if I pass the mental illness gene to them? I don’t want them to have to go through what I’ve gone through.

Do you live by yourself? Can Say: I live with my parents. It’s cheaper and it’s better than having a roommate who I don’t like. Can’t Say: I live with my parents because it isn’t safe for me to live by myself and I make no money so I can’t afford to live anywhere else at the moment. My parents are great, but I deeply miss my independence. And no matter how old you are, when you live with your parents you still don’t feel like a complete adult. So I live where I have to live, but I would give anything to live on my own again.

Where do you see yourself in five years? Can Say: I’d like to see where the future takes me. Can’t Say: Not being hospitalized for five years straight is a pretty good goal.

To be fair, all of us have some version of answers to these questions playing in our heads. Polite conversation isn’t about really getting to know someone. It’s about forming an impression of someone based on what we believe are socially acceptable norms and then (silently) locating that person in our social schema based on the information they share. Being honest in such superficial situations would be a radical and liberating act -- one I hope someday I won’t be so afraid to commit -- but it comes at the price of awkwardness, discomfort and possible humiliation. And for now at least that’s not a price I’m willing to pay.

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mrreuben · 5 years ago

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Life Plan

Reflection

I was a very arrogant student. I refuse to pay attention in any academic related matters, I never studied any lesson from any subject, refused to practice analytical and problem solving activities, ignored and copied assignments that I was responsible for, and submitted low quality, subpar projects just to “get by” through my requirements in High School. I foolishly believed that I was naturally smart, and solely relying on my stock knowledge and intellectual ability is enough to get me through high school and college, which it miraculously did for the former.

Outside School, from the beginning of my second year in my secondary school, I started to get curious and entered all the vices my parents was telling me never to even attempt on trying. I began to start smoking, drinking, even using recreational drugs with my classmates. We also play competitive computer games excessively which resulted in learning how to gamble my allowances through games and record high numbers of absenteeism in school.

During these times, from 2nd year up to the year that I graduated from high school (fortunately I graduated in time), I thought I was living the life. I believed that this was how cool people were supposed to spend their time, by only thinking about yourself and what makes you happy, regardless of the consequence. I thought that I could continue living this degenerate life of arrogance through college, but God has a way of teaching his children a lesson.

Humbled

With God grace, I was admitted to the University of Santo Tomas, Faculty of Engineering and enrolled in B.S. Civil Engineering. My confidence and arrogance, as usual, was up the roof, and like in high school, the way of life that I’ve been accustomed with was being incorporated since the very beginning of my college life. I immediately started looking for friends or classmates that shares with me the same degenerate lifestyle of drinking and partying. I also did not put any effort in studying my subjects. Given the challenge that mathematics and physics poses, my arrogance and hard-headed attitude of self-confidence has been rooted so deep in my character that I was certain that I do not need to change my ways.

All in all, I had 18 units of failures in the faculty until the day that would wake me up and humbled me down came. I, again, failed some subjects, but this time, it amounted to 9 units, which is the maximum number of failures for one semester in the Faculty of Engineering. In order to be able to enroll for the next term, I need to sign an ultimatum that I cannot fail another subject in the faculty again, lest I’ll be kicked out of the program. Also, I would need to bring my parents to the faculty so they can be made aware of the agreement, and they too would also be required to sign the papers for my conditional status.

When my parents found out the status of my academics, they became furious, but rather than putting a chain around my neck and controlling my lifestyle and routines, they told me that I was free to do whatever I want, whenever I want, but he reminded me that we can only control our choices, but not our consequences. He told me that making mistakes is part of life, but we must be responsible enough to face the consequence of our actions. He also affirmed me that in the end, I am the one who will be most affected with my choices, that every choice that I make will have an impact in my future, both near and far.

The Redemption

After the epiphany, I have decided that I will get up and turn my life around. Even though the partying lifestyle continued, I made sure that I am able to execute my responsibilities and commitments in my academics, which in turn, first gave me an acceptable passing grade, into having one of the highest average in our major subjects and winning the Best Researcher of the Year for our thesis in the faculty of engineering. Now, I am a licensed Civil Engineer, a former engineer of the prestigious EEI Corporation, the largest construction firm in the country, and a current Engineer and Public Servant at the Department of Public Works and Highways – Head Office, which are known to accept only a dozen of engineers from thousands of applicants annually.

I remember how I pitched myself through my interview with the Undersecretary of DPWH, she asked me what I can say about my subjects that came up short in the passing marks, I told her that I went into a self-destructive pattern, but I was able to redeem myself through hard work and determination. Afterwards, she took me as an employee and told me, intelligence is great, but it comes and goes, persistence and the ability to redeem yourself on the other hand, is more extraordinary, and she was right.

Personal Vision Statement

In a few years, I will be known as a loving and compassionate persons who loves to help the less fortunate.

Personal Mission Statement

I will live to help and inspire the next generation to aim for the stars. Don’t listen to those who says you can’t do it, because you know you can.

Priority A: Family

As a young professional who’ve just started his journey into the ladder of career development, my main priority right now is to weigh in my priorities and learn to see and appreciate what really is important. Family should always come first, no matter how busy or demanding the career is. In our last days, we won’t tell ourselves that “I should’ve spent more time in the office” or “I should’ve aimed for this promotion”. I believe that what matters most are the bond that we share with our family. A bond that can be built only by spending time and prioritizing each other.

Milestones and Timeframe

Right now, I am maintaining a work and life balance that I feel is in the right track with spending quality time with my parents. I worked in a company before that has required me to live far from our home for almost 2 years and a company so busy that I can’t even retreat to our home on weekends. I’ve learned from those times that with this set up, I believe that I am wasting my youth. No time for family, friends, and others. Working in the construction would require you to work for almost 24 hours a day. I’ve decided to resign my position, even if it’s a prestigious company, and transferred to company who offers a more flexible schedule compared to the latter.

In five years’ time, I hope that I have found the right woman for me. The woman that I can spend the rest of my life with. I do not fancy myself in needing to buy a house, a car, saving significant amounts in order to marry someone. As long as we are happy and compatible, I believe that we can handle starting our own life from scratch.

In 10 years’ time, I hope that me and my wife has given this world two or maybe three wonderful children who are well mannered, well educated, God fearing, and someone who sees the good in this dark world of ours.

In 20 years’ time, hopefully I have taught my children well, especially with essential values on how to treat people with respect and diligence. I hope I have given my wife all the love and respect that she deserve. I pray that I would have a wonderful family that is full with joy, even amidst struggles and challenges, I hope that we would be able to stay together, and fight these adversaries in strong unity.

Priority B: Attitude

I’ve always been an optimistic. I always think of life as something that you should spend to make each day count. I rarely miss the opportunity to have fun with friends and family, but sometimes, too much fun is also unhealthy both physically and emotionally.

I always believed in living in a “happy go lucky” lifestyle also when I was younger. I still hold unto the YOLO life, but I’ve realized that there are things bigger than me that I might be able to contribute even a small amount of my talent and skills for the better good.

Milestones and Timeframe

Today, I meditate and enforce myself that I must think bigger. There are many things that I want to contribute to my community, especially to the younger generation. I fix my eyes upon the need of my society and how I can help now that I am earning a significant amount.

In 10-20 years, I hope that my attitude in life will be more relaxed. Instead of being aggressive, I hope that I will fix and focus my priorities, especially prioritizing the family first.

In 20+ years, I hope that I can share my journey, and how my thinking and character has changed from my youth. I plan to share my mistakes and realizations to my children, to teach them the way things are, so that they might minimize their regrets in their life.

Priority C: Financial

See annex A*

Milestones and Timeframe

See annex A*

Priority D: Social

I’ve always been extrovert. I love people, I love talking and interacting with people. I am most happy when there are people around me, especially if I am able to engage in conversations with them regarding the things that interests me, namely, history, physics, philosophy, art, music, sports, and food.

I also have a passion in helping people, especially the needy. I also love bringing people who feels entitled, and doesn’t appreciate the things that they have in charity events. These events that I have engaged in, and brought some of my unfamiliar friends with the reality of the financially and emotionally struggling population, has given me and them some perspective and appreciation for the things we have now.

Milestones and Timeframe

I plan to be more active in the community in the next 5-10 years. Join and be active in community development groups and worker’s union memberships.

In 10-20 years time, I plan to strengthen my networks of colleagues, friends, and fellow entrepreneur in order to build a more engaging and positive society

Priority E: Career

I have a lot of goals. I see myself as a successful engineer and business owner in the future. I plan to maximize my skills and potential through every opportunity that may come about. I also believe that I am a risk taker. I am willing to step away from my comfort zone in order to learn new things that will improve my career path.

Milestones and Timeframe

In 5 years time after I am finished with my Public Service, I can see myself as an engineer in a fortune 500 company, and earning a significant amount to support my future plans for my family and my current and future family’s finances.

In 10-15 years time, I see myself as an engineer respected in my current field. A professional who has credibility and stature. I plan to make my parents proud and confident regarding my future and the future of my new family, I also plan to train the younger professionals so as I grow older, I am slowly passing the responsibilities to my apprentice and I can spend more time with my family.

In 30-40 years, I see myself near retirement and living a more relaxed attitude in terms of my career. I would want to focus more on charity and engaging community service, and most importantly, enjoying my family, and possibly my grandchildren that my children has given me. I plan to oversee the development of my kids through their careers and attitudes toward life in order for them to grow in the right values for the better of the common good.

Priority F: Public Service

During my first job as an engineer, I worked in a private company who builds government infrastructure, specifically the Skyway and MRT7. I did my duties with great honor, knowing that these platform that I am currently standing, will be a monumental stepping stone for the progress and convenience of my fellow countrymen.

Today, I am currently working for the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), and as a literal public servant and engineer of the Philippine Government, it is with great honor to be part of the Build Build Build program of our current administration. Our office, the Planning Department of DPWH, spearheads the project proposal for the Philippine Infrastructure Masterplan for the next 50 years. It is with great pride that I am able to be in service of the public for more than a year now.

Milestones and Timeframe

I am currently an employee of the Philippine Government, and I plan to stay here for the next 3-5 years. Public Service has always been part of my plan and passion, and I want contribute to DPWH the best of my abilities in engineering and other fields that might help the department to be more efficient and effective in helping the Filipino people.

In 10 years time, if I decided to end my public service, I plan to continuously engage my society through community service. I plan to volunteer on helping the poor, cleaning the streets, and to operations that will help the country to be a cleaner, safer, just, and humane nation

In 15-20 years time, I plan to share my nationalism attitude to my children. I will bring them to my community service and outreaches so they will learn the essence of patriotism and national pride.

Priority G: Education

Initially, I love to learn, but I hate going to school. As I have written in my life reflection, I have failed numerous subjects in my college days. I always skip classes, never study upcoming quizzes and exams, and when the class starts at the morning, I usually attend it while I am in a state of hangover. So it is ironic today that you can find me pursuing a post graduate degree in the prestigious De La Salle University.

2 years after I graduated and worked as an engineer, I’ve realized that I miss school, and I want to learn more about the corporate world. I also want to meet new people and expand my network in different fields, for almost all of my friends are all engineers. That is why I have decided to just go and take a chance in enrolling in one of the top management schools in the Philippines, the DLSU.

Milestones and Timeframe

I will finish my Post Graduate Diploma in Management this April 2020, and I plan to proceed in taking up Masters in Business Administration in De La Salle University after a semestral break.

In 20-25 years time, I plan to finally teach my passion in any school that will give me an opportunity. I plan to teach history and philosophy to the younger generation. I hope I can make them appreciate the subject as it has appreciate me.

Priority H: Physical

Our family is blessed with good health. Elders from both sides averages a life span of 80-90 years old, no cancers, no complicated diseases or infection. My father is in his mid-60s and my mother is in her late 50s, and both of them are working in their optimum. No maintenance medication, and no history of illness. But even with this fact, we still have to take care of our body, and be careful to not abuse it.

As I have said, I have the tendency to indulge myself in partying and drinking excessively, especially while I am young, single, and very early in my career. That is why I have started to prioritize in disciplining myself on what food to eat, and to control my drinking and partying culture.

Milestones and Timeframe

I plan to lessen my vices and continue regular exercise. I also plan to lessen my meat intake and eat more vegetables. I will invite my family to join me in living a healthy life style.

In 5-10 years time, If I will have enough finances, I will start buying organic foods to have healthier food options, and to also help the environment and to support the advocacy for animal rights.

Priority I: Pleasure

As I’ve mentioned in my story, I am a person who indulges himself to pleasures. I admit that I love to travel, party, drink alcohol, and eat. I also love the thrill of life. I get excited in things that omits danger. I love heights, speed, zero or larger gravity. I delight myself in living the best life that I can by travelling and exploring the unknown.

Milestones and Timeframe

In 5 years time, I see myself as a more mature and disciplined adult. I limit my alcohol intake and other vices. I would go to parties at a frequency of less than 4 times a year.

Also, during those times, I believe that I have found substitutes for my constant urge to seek thrills. I hope I had found a hobby who doesn’t have the same amount of risk for probably by that time I already have a family.

Priority J: Artistic

I have been inclined to music all my life. Since I was 9 years old, I was already playing guitar, and worked my way in being skillful also in percussions, drums, keyboard, bass, and even singing.

I also have a tremendous fondness in philosophy, science, and history. I believe that these things also translates to arts. The art of human reasoning, critique, and thinking processes. The art of the physical and scientific laws that governs our daily lives, namely, gravity, physics, astronomy, thermodynamics, relativity, etc. And the art of history, not specifically the art itself, but the progress and advancement of the life and human population. The process of evolution, the rise and fall of different civilizations all across the continents, and the religions that shaped our world today. I love reading and learning the catalysts that forced the chain of events that has shaped our current history.

Milestones and Timeframe

In 5 to 10 years’ time, I plan to share my talent and skills to my wife and children. Hopefully, they will share the same interest and enthusiasm in music, art, science, philosophy and history like me. I believe that art is one of the keys that help develops not only our capabilities, but also our personalities and character. The things mentioned above helped me to question everything, to be curious in life and in knowledge. To seek the truth and adhere to it. It also taught me patient and persistence. It made me realize, especially the musical skills that it doesn’t come over night. You need to be motivated to practice diligently with no compromise. This is what I want to pass on to my wife, children, and the children after them. I believe that education starts from home, and this might help my family in attaining a beautiful perspective in life.

#lifeplan goals CSR DLSU

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multimodalmagic · 5 years ago

Link

*Gentle music fades in*

Rebecca: This is the You Are Not Alone Podcast brought to you by Rebecca Santana with my co-hosts today Jessie Modrak and Noah Sullivan. Jessie is a recent UF graduate. Noah is a current UF student, as am I. And to start this off, I just want to say this is not going to be super happy podcast. It is about a very serious subject: Suicide rates among college students and mental health among college students. It’s not a super fun subject to talk about but it’s really important, so I have two students with me today to talk about their own personal experiences with that. First I really want to mention a UF student who took his own life very recently. In early June Huixiang Chen a former UF doctoral student took his own life and so we just want to take a moment to remember him.

*moment of silence*

Rebecca: So Jessie, tell me about what you’ve seen in terms of mental health among college students and kind of your experience with that.

Jessie: Yeah so, I feel like personally I have never struggled with a lot of the same mental health challenges that I’ve seen a lot of my very close friends struggle with. I’ve seen people who constantly have anxiety attacks over their academic school work or because of the stress of having to be able to financially support themselves while in college. And that’s very hard to witness and also very hard to support people through a lot of times because there really isn’t any proper education on how you should help other people when they’re struggling with mental illness. So when you find yourself interacting with people who are considering taking their own life it can be a very daunting thing and very overwhelming to be able to help walk someone through.

Rebecca: For sure. So would it be surprising for you to know that about a thousand college students take their lives every year?

Jessie: I feel like that figure could honestly even be bigger than that. I wonder even if that’s just at our university in general or if that’s a consistent stat across other universities, but that number’s already just way too high.

Rebecca: It’s true. Noah, what did you think about that?

Noah: Well, as transferring from a different university, seeing that the academic standard here is a lot higher than a lot of other colleges. Kids are a lot smarter, and that creates a competitive edge, and kids want to get that competitive edge and they’re making themselves more stressed out cause they’re studying a lot more. They’re studying harder. They’re studying longer hours. They’re exhausting their body. They’re not gaining the actual nutrients they need because all the time they’ve taken to study. So just to see them put their body through, and their minds through extraneous studying, and behaviors that cause them to stress and get depressed can change their mindset, and it looks terrible throughout the universities across the nations because it just proves that our education system is not really helping us but could be destroying us inside, internally.

Jessie: I think another thing to touch upon is the social pressure that I feel like a lot of college students are under, especially with the use of social media. I think people are way more prone to comparing themselves to others. And when you are feeling alone and by yourself, the first thing that you turn to is your phone, and people paint a reality that might not be actually showing the full picture, and so it kind of sinks people deeper into that hole and make them feel more alone. And it kind of just adds to all of that additional academic stress to be able to prove yourself, not just as a student, but as an emerging adult in this world. That you are capable of being able to financially support yourself and also being able to mentally support yourself, it can be a lot to handle.

Noah: Yeah.

Rebecca: Yeah

Noah: Honestly, as a person that doesn’t have a phone, I’ve been without a phone for three weeks now. Not having to go on social media, not having to worry about anything outside then what my realm is that’s right in front of me has been different cause it’s what matters what’s in front of me versus what’s in virtual reality, and it’s nice not having to worry about the outside but only if things are close to me.

Rebecca: Yeah, I think there’s a lot to manage, a lot to keep up with, and especially most people coming into college who have never ever had to do any of this on their own. You know, create new social circles. The pressure’s really intense and trying to maintain perceptions about yourself to the rest of the world can be incredibly stressful. More than half of college students in the United States have admitted to having suicidal thoughts at one point or another. Not saying that all of those students had them while in college, but I think that just kind of says something about our academic system and how it might not be working to our advantage all the time.

Jessie: Yeah, no I mean I definitely agree. I’m curious to even know what the stats are for people who are our age who aren’t in college to see exactly how they’re able to mentally cope with the reality of their own lives too because if you’re not in college as a full time student, odds are at this point in your life, from 18 to your early twenties, you’re probably working full time and that adds its own other layer of stress. So it is very interesting, but I’m also curious to see whether or not it’s actually the academics that’s completely to blame for this increase of suicide rates.

Rebecca: For sure. It’s definitely a lot of people in our general age group. The people most likely to commit suicide are in their late teens and early twenties, so definitely in the same age group. Not always late teens. There has been a spike in earlier teens also. There’s been a spike in suicide rates in general across the board but definitely among our age group specifically. Just something to consider. Gay people are much more likely to commit suicide, and just in our generation there are a lot of people who are not conforming to general normal sexuality, normal gender norms, that sort of thing which can always create that, maybe that plays a role. But I think there are a lot of reasons that people in our age group can be feeling that way, but there aren’t always resources for us, which is the problem. So tell me about the resources that you felt you had available to you in college and now as a recent graduate that you feel you have available to you now.

Jessie: Yeah, so I feel like being able to cope with and maintain your mental health can take place in so many different forms, and it’s really different for each individual. I’m a strong proponent for being active, and that if you can take care of your body physically it can help you take care of your mental capacity. In college I dove face first into recreational club sports, and I made that a huge stress reliever for me because it allowed me to be able to actually disconnect from my academic world and from my personal life and helped me really to just focus on strengthening my body. And also it brought me so many positive connections in my life. And even so now, I still use sports as a mental health escape, but that’s just what I do. In college I also went through a very difficult time when I lost my father unexpectedly and I turned to the Counseling and Wellness Center for help, and I was told that I needed to sit in on a group therapy session because that was the only option that they had available, and all therapists within our city were completely booked for the next four or five months, so I really had no opportunity to talk to someone one on one individually about what I was going through. And so the only way that I could seek support was going to be through that group/peer avenue, and that was just something that I didn’t feel necessarily comfortable with or what I wanted to do in order to help myself heal from all of the pain and trauma that I was experiencing at that time, so that was really frustrating to have wanted to turn to my university and to tell them these things. And in order to have gotten extensions on a lot of my assignments because I was struggling, I had to prove my father’s death, and I wish I had felt more support from the university during that hard time.

Rebecca: Yeah, absolutely. I feel like a lot of students at UF and across the nation are just not being served right by their universities in terms of funding for mental health and programs in general. I have had my own difficult experiences with the Wellness Center at UF. Noah, as a transfer student what kind of mental health resources did you have at your old school and how do they differ from what you have at UF?

Noah: Resources that we had at UNF… It was talked about, but is was never a huge source. There was the LGBT community, that wellness center, and then there’s a women’s help center, but you hardly heard about it. They definitely made you listen and do a lot of reviews, not reviews but a lot of seminars with the campus. Each class, like a civics class they made you take, take you into and watch a presentation of it, but it was very hard to access. You could walk in and do walk in hours, but it was very hard to look up online to see whether or not they’re available for not. But I’ve never experienced anything like that so I’ve never looked into it as much as other people have so my general knowledge about the resources is very vague. But here I’ve seen a lot of good things about the CWC, but I’m forced to the career wellness center here for a class, but I haven’t done it yet, so I’m curious to see how it goes. But just to see from UNF to UF, the resources here seems more apparent than it did at UNF.

Rebecca: Yeah, I definitely think UF has tried to do a good job about educating people about these services and about these resources, but actually having them available has been the issue. I know other students who have talked about just very long waits to get appointments. When they are able to get appointments there’s a time limit. Most people, if they’re actually seeing a one-on-one therapist at the Wellness Center, they are only able to see them for... I think six weeks is the maximum, and then after that what do you do if you’re not feeling yourself again let’s say. I personally think it’s a funding issue. I think colleges across the nation are just not putting enough money into these programs, and we just seem like we don’t have enough people on staff in our Wellness Center to keep up with the demand for mental health care, you know, here at UF especially in this really competitive environment.

Jessie: Yeah, I feel like that could be it. I full-heartedly believe that everyone who’s involved in the Counseling and Wellness Center is truly doing their jobs in order to make people’s lives better, and it could be a funding issue, but I also think there’s such a high demand for it that even with enough money we should be trying to figure out what more can we do ‘cause it’s not going to be just about making sure that everyone has their own personal therapist. It’s going to be about making sure that we all support each other and that we can all rely on each other for mental health, not just on a professional. In certain cases I think that bringing in a professional can be very helpful for people who are really suffering from suicidal thoughts and depression and anxiety, but I feel like a lot of what college is is just going to be very intense degrees of stress, and we need to be able to properly educate students on how to handle their stress management and how to be able to make sure that they find avenues in which they can decompress.

Rebecca: Yeah, absolutely. Noah what have you found helps you manage your mental health as a student?

Noah: I really like my job. My job creates a good environment for me actually. I know some people might not like it, but I work for New Scooters 4 Less, and it stays to my schedule very well, plus I’m on two club sports teams, so I play a lot of sports. And that clears my mind because I’m thinking about the sport at the time instead of thinking all the mental stuff that’s happening in my head. So it clears it out, gets that frustration out. I also like gardening a lot, so I garden a lot, and that gives me a lot of time to think for myself and to have my own time of peace and kind of meditate on what I need to think about.

Rebecca: Nice. Awesome. So just a few things here to wrap this up. If you think that someone you know might be struggling with these issues, just really try to be empathetic and listen to them. A lot of people just really feel like they need to be heard, so always be that ear. If you do go to UF or are a staff or faculty member you can take some trainings. An online training is available or an in-person training about how to spot some of the warning signs that someone might be having suicidal thoughts, and if you need to call someone right away you can call either the National Suicide Prevention Hotline or the Alachua County Crisis Center. I have the number for the National Suicide Prevention Hotline right now. It is 1-800-273-8255. This has been the You Are Not Alone Podcast. I am your host, Rebecca Santana, and thank you so much for listening.

*Gentle music fades out*

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ztafraternity · 6 years ago

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A Zeta True: Martha C. Edens

Our theme for the 2018–2020 biennium is Be Zetas True. During this first year of the biennium, the 120th year of ZTA, we will introduce a dozen Zetas—one for each decade—who epitomize what it means to “Be Zetas True.” Find all their stories here.

–

By Christy Marx Barber, Staff Writer (Alpha Psi Chapter alumna)

Imagine you’re a newly initiated ZTA college freshman on a vacation in the hometown of the ZTA National President. Would you be bold enough to call her up and ask if she wanted to grab a cup of coffee? That was collegian Martha Carolyn Edens in the summer of 1946.

Pictured: A portrait of Martha circa 1962

Martha pledged Omicron Chapter at Brenau University in 1945 and was initiated in March 1946. Grand President Helen Margaret Harrison visited Omicron that spring and was so impressed with Martha that she gave the young Zeta her phone number. Martha traveled that summer to Los Angeles, where Mrs. Harrison lived. She had the number, so she called to ask if they could meet. Over afternoon tea at a glamorous hotel, Mrs. Harrison convinced Martha to transfer to University of South Carolina to help strengthen Beta Omicron Chapter. That was the first of many decisions where Martha put ZTA first.

After graduation in 1948, Martha attended ZTA’s Golden Anniversary Convention and was in Province gatherings with the Founders. That Convention led to her becoming the most important leader of our second century.

In 1952, she was appointed Province President and in 1962 elected to National Council as Second Vice President. In 1968, she became National President while extreme social changes threatened the existence of Greek-letter organizations. The civil rights era was perhaps the most tumultuous time in ZTA history.

Pictured: Martha at National Leadership Conference 1999

At Conventions 1968, 1970 and 1972, delegates fiercely debated changes to ZTA’s restrictive membership policy and voted them down. After the first vote in 1972, Ms. Edens decided to put the motion up for an unprecedented second time.

“This is not a time for selfish interests, but it is time to consider what is best for Zeta Tau Alpha in its entirety,” she told delegates. “This is a time for courage, for mutual understanding and for wisdom.”

On the second vote, the selective wording of our policy was removed. Forty years later, when she shared her oral history for the ZTA archives, Ms. Edens looked back on that momentous time. “I really think my greatest accomplishment was keeping us together, getting us back on track of what we were founded about,” she said.

Pictured: Martha reveals a rendering of what would be ZTA International Office

Ms. Edens retired as National President in 1974 but returned as Extension Director until 1980 and again from 1984 to 1986. ZTA added 39 chapters while she held this role. In tribute, the silver award for the most outstanding new chapter is named the Martha C. Edens Award.

She joined the ZTA Foundation board in 1989, became president in 1990 and held that office through the Centennial Convention in 1998. She remained a Foundation director until her passing on Oct. 9, 2015.

Ms. Edens lived our Creed’s call to service. She was president of the local school board and state Easter Seals, on the boards of the Salvation Army and the local hospital. She rose through the ranks of the state and national Republican party and was a member of the Site Selection Committee for the 1996 Republican National Convention. Because of this philanthropic work, the ZTA Foundation honored her as the Outstanding Alumna in 1996.

Pictured: Martha speaking with collegians in the ‘90s

From the time she pledged through 20 years on National Council and until her passing, Ms. Edens’ actions became her legacy. In her oral history, she shared three requests of future ZTA members.

First, be part of something bigger than yourself. “I always wondered, what if I am the only Zeta anyone meets? What opinion would they have of my sorority?”

Second, make a commitment. “Their lives will be enriched if they are not an observer, but a participant in ZTA.”

Third, lead for the greater good. “In any decision, I did what I thought was best for ZTA—not necessarily for me, but for Zeta.”

Martha Carolyn Edens was a bold collegian and an even bolder leader. Her boldness inspires us all to #BeZetasTrue.

#bezetastrue #christy barber #zta #zeta #sorority

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blackkudos · 8 years ago

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Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks (June 7, 1917 – December 3, 2000) was an American poet, author, and teacher. She was the recipient of many awards for her work and influence; including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry on May 1, 1950, making her the first African American woman to receive that award.

Throughout her career Brooks received many more honors. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968, a position held until her death, and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1985.

Early life

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born on June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas, and died on December 3, 2000 in Chicago, IL. She was the first child of David Anderson Brooks and Keziah (Wims) Brooks. Her father was a janitor for a music company who had hoped to pursue a career as a doctor but sacrificed that aspiration to get married and raise a family. Her mother was a school teacher as well as a concert pianist trained in classical music. Family lore held that her paternal grandfather had escaped slavery to join the Union forces during the American Civil War.

When Brooks was six weeks old, her family moved to Chicago during the Great Migration; from then on, Chicago remained her home. According to biographer Kenny Jackson Williams, Brooks first attended a prestigious integrated high school in the city with a predominantly white student body, Hyde Park High School, transferred to the all-black Wendell Phillips High School, and then moved to the integrated Englewood High School. After completing high school, she graduated in 1936 from Wilson Junior College, now known as Kennedy-King College. Due to the social dynamics of the various schools, in conjunction with time period in which she attended them, Brooks faced racial injustice that over time contributed to her understanding of the prejudice and bias in established systems and dominant institutions in her own surroundings as well as ever relevant mindset of the country.

Brooks began writing at an early age and her mother encouraged her saying, ''You are going to be the lady Paul Laurence Dunbar."

After these early educational experiences, Brooks never pursued a four-year degree because she knew she wanted to be a writer and considered it unnecessary. "I am not a scholar," she later said. "I'm just a writer who loves to write and will always write." She worked as a typist to support herself while she pursued her career.

She would closely identify with Chicago for the rest of her life. In a 1994 interview, she remarked on this,

"(L)iving in the city, I wrote differently than I would have if I had been raised in Topeka, KS...I am an organic Chicagoan. Living there has given me a multiplicity of characters to aspire for. I hope to live there the rest of my days. That's my headquarters.

Career

Writing

Brooks published her first poem, "Eventide", in a children's magazine, American Childhood, when she was 13 years old. By the age of sixteen she had already written and published approximately seventy-five poems. She received commendations on her poetic work and encouragement from James Weldon Johnson and later, Langston Hughes, both well-known writers with whom she kept communication with and whose readings she attended in Chicago. At seventeen, she started submitting her work to "Lights and Shadows," the poetry column of the Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper. Her poems, many published while she attended Wilson Junior College, ranged in style from traditional ballads and sonnets to poems using blues rhythms in free verse.

Her characters were often drawn from the inner city life that Brooks knew well. She said, "I lived in a small second-floor apartment at the corner, and I could look first on one side and then the other. There was my material."

By 1941, Brooks was taking part in poetry workshops. A particularly influential one was organized by Inez Cunningham Stark, an affluent white woman with a strong literary background. Stark offered writing workshops to African-Americans on Chicago's South Side, which Brooks attended. It was here she gained momentum in finding her voice and a deeper knowledge of the techniques of her predecessors. Renowned poet Langston Hughes stopped by the workshop and heard Brooks read "The Ballad of Pearl May Lee." Brooks continued to work diligently at her writing and growing the community of artists and writers around her as her poetry began to be taken more seriously. She and her husband frequently threw parties at their apartment at 623 E. 63rd Street and it was in the kitchenette of that apartment that Brooks hosted a party for her friend and mentor Langston Hughes. Once he unexpectedly dropped in and famously shared a meal of mustard greens, ham hocks, and candied sweet potatoes with Brooks and her husband Henry Blakely.

Brooks' published her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), with Harper and Row, after strong show of support to the publisher from author Richard Wright. He said to the editors who solicited his opinion on Brooks' work:

"There is no self-pity here, not a striving for effects. She takes hold of reality as it is and renders it faithfully.... She easily catches the pathos of petty destinies; the whimper of the wounded; the tiny accidents that plague the lives of the desperately poor, and the problem of color prejudice among Negroes."

The book earned instant critical acclaim for its authentic and textured portraits of life in Bronzeville. Brooks later said it was a glowing review by Paul Engle in the Chicago Tribune that "initiated My Reputation." Engle stated that Brooks' poems were no more "Negro poetry" than Robert Frost's work was "white poetry." Brooks received her first Guggenheim Fellowship in 1946 and was included as one of the “Ten Young Women of the Year” in Mademoiselle magazine.

In 1953, Brooks published her first and only narrative book, a novella titled Maud Martha, which in a series of thirty-four small vignettes, follows the life of a black woman named Maud Martha in detail as she moved about life from childhood to adulthood. It tells the story of "a woman with doubts about herself and where and how she fits into the world. Maud's concern is not so much that she is inferior but that she is perceived as being ugly," states author Harry B. Shaw in his book, Gwendolyn Brooks. Maud suffers prejudice and discrimination not only from white individuals but also from black individuals who have lighter skin tones than hers, something that is direct reference to Brooks' personal experience. Eventually, Maud stands up for herself by turning her back on a patronizing and racist store clerk. "The book is ... about the triumph of the lowly," Shaw comments.

In 1967, the year of Hughes' death, Brooks attended the Second Black Writers' Conference at Nashville's Fisk University. Here, according to one version of events, she met activists and artists such as Imamu Amiri Baraka, Don L. Lee and others who exposed her to new black cultural nationalism. Recent studies argue that she had been involved in leftist politics in Chicago for many years and, under the pressures of McCarthyism, adopted a black nationalist posture as a means of distancing herself from her prior political connections. Brooks' experience at the conference inspired many of her subsequent literary activities. She taught creative writing to some of Chicago's Blackstone Rangers, otherwise a violent criminal gang. In 1968 she published one of her most famous poems, In the Mecca, a long poem about a mother's search for her lost child in a Chicago apartment building. The poem was nominated for the National Book Award for poetry.

Brooks' second book of poetry, Annie Allen (1950), focused on the life and experiences of a young Black girl as she grew into womanhood in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago. The book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry; she also was awarded Poetry magazine's Eunice Tietjens Prize.

Her autobiographical Report From Part One, including reminiscences, interviews, photographs and vignettes, came out in 1972, and Report From Part Two was published in 1995, when she was almost 80.

Teaching

Brooks said her first teaching experience was at the University of Chicago when she was invited by author Frank London Brown to teach a course in American literature. It was the beginning of her lifelong commitment to sharing poetry and teaching writing.

Brooks taught extensively around the country and held posts at Columbia College Chicago, Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago State University, Elmhurst College, Columbia University, City College of New York, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

On May 1, 1996, Brooks returned to her birthplace of Topeka, Kansas. She gave the keynote speech for the Third Annual Kaw Valley Girl Scout Council's "Women of Distinction Banquet and String of Pearls Auction."

Archives

The Rare Book & Manuscript Library (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) acquired Brooks' archives from her daughter Nora. In addition, the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley has a collection of her personal papers, especially from 1950 to 1989.

Family life

In 1939, Brooks married Henry Lowington Blakely, Jr. They had two children: Henry Lowington Blakely III, born on October 10, 1940; and Nora Blakely, born in 1951.

From mid-1961 to late-1964, Henry III served in the U.S. Marine Corps, first at Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego and then at Marine Corps Air Station Kaneohe Bay. During this time, Brooks mentored his fiancée, Kathleen Hardiman, today known as anthropologist Kathleen Rand Reed, in writing poetry. Upon his return, Blakely and Hardiman married in 1965. Brooks had so enjoyed the mentoring relationship that she began to engage more frequently in that role with the new generation of young black poets.

In the year 1990, her works were given a permanent home when Chicago State University established the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing on campus. On her eightieth birthday, in 1997, Brooks was honored with tributes from Chicago to Washington, D.C. Gwendolyn Brooks died of cancer at her Chicago home on December 3, 2000.

Honors and legacy

1946, Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry

1946, American Academy of Arts & Letters Award

1950, Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

1968, appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois, a position she held until her death in 2000

1976, the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America

1985, selected as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, an honorary one-year position whose title was renamed the next year to Poet Laureate

1988, inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame

1989, recipient, Life Time Achievement Award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

1989, awarded the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement by the Poetry Society of America

1992, awarded the Aiken Taylor Award by the Sewanee Review

1994, chosen as the National Endowment for the Humanities' Jefferson Lecturer, one of the highest honors in American literature and the highest award in the humanities given by the federal government.

1994, Recipient of the National Book Foundations's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters

1995, presented with the National Medal of Arts

1995, honored as the first Woman of the Year chosen by the Harvard Black Men's Forum

1995, received the Chicago History Museum "Making History Award" for Distinction in Literature

1997, awarded the Order of Lincoln award from The Lincoln Academy of Illinois, the highest honor granted by the State of Illinois

Brooks also received more than 75 honorary degrees from colleges and universities worldwide.

Legacy

1970: "For Sadie and Maud" by Eleanor Holmes Norton, included in Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings From The Women's Liberation Movement (1970), quotes all of Brooks' poem "Sadie and Maud"

1970: Gwendolyn Brooks Cultural Center, Western Illinois University, Macomb, Illinois

1995: Gwendolyn Brooks Elementary School, Aurora, Illinois

1990: Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing, Chicago State University

2001: Gwendolyn Brooks College Preparatory Academy, Chicago, Illinois

2001: Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School, Harvey, Illinois

2002: Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School, Oak Park, Illinois

2003: Gwendolyn Brooks Illinois State Library, Springfield, Illinois

2002: 100 Greatest African Americans

2004 Gwendolyn Brooks Park named by the Chicago Park District, 4542 S. Greenwood Ave. Chicago IL 60653

2005: Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School, Bolingbrook, Illinois

2012: Honored on a United States' postage stamp.

Wikipedia

#Gwendolyn Brooks #06-07 #12-03

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tacophish · 8 years ago

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Liu Xiaobo, I have no enemies: my final statement*

June 1989 was the major turning point in my 50 years on life’s road. Before that, I was a member of the first group of students after restoration of the college entrance examination after the Cultural Revolution (1977); my career was s smooth ride from undergraduate to grad student through to PhD. After graduation I stayed on as a lecturer at Beijing Normal University. On the podium, I was a popular teacher, well received by students. I was at the same time a public intellectual. In the 1980s I published articles and books that created an impact, was frequently invited to speak in various places, and was invited to go abroad to Europe and the US as a visiting scholar. What I required of myself was: both as a person and in my writing, I had to live with honesty, responsibility and dignity. Subsequently, because I had returned from the US to take part in the 1989 movement, I was imprisoned for “counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement to crime”, loding the platform which was my passion; I was never again allowed publish or speak in public in China. Simply for expressing divergent political views and taking part in a peaceful and democratic movement, a teacher loses his podium, a writer loses the right to publish, and a public intellectual loses the chance to speak publicly, which is a sad thing, both for myself as an individual, and for China after three decades of reform and opening up.

Thinking about it, my most dramatic experiences after June Fourth have all linked with courts; the two opportunities I had to speak in public have been provided by trials held in the People’s Intermediate Court in Beijing, one in January 1991 and one now. Although the charges on each occasion were different, they were in essence the same, both being crimes of expression.

Twenty years on, the innocent souls of June Fourth do not yet rest in peace, and I, who had been drawn into the path of dissidence by the passions of June Fourth, after leaving the Qincheng Prison in 1991, lost in the right to speak openly in my own country, and could only do so through overseas media, and hence was monitored for many years; placed under surveillance (May 1995- January 1996); educated through labour (October 1996 – October 1999s), and now once again am thrust into the dock by enemies in the regime. But I still want to tell the regime that deprives me of my freedom, I stand by the belief I expressed twenty years ago in my “June Second hunger strike declaration”— I have no enemies, and no hatred. None of the police who have monitored, arrested and interrogated me, the prosecutors who prosecuted me, or the judges who sentence me, are my enemies. While I’m unable to accept your surveillance, arrest, prosecution or sentencing, I respect your professions and personalities, including Zhang Rongge and Pan Xueqing who act for the prosecution at present. I was aware of your respect and sincerity in your interrogation of me on 3 December.

For hatred is corrosive of a person’s wisdom and conscience; the mentality of enmity can poison a nation’s spirit, instigate brutal life and death struggles, destroy a society’s tolerance and humanity, and block a nation’s progress to freedom and democracy. I hope therefore to be able to transcend my personal vicissitudes in understanding the development of the state and changes in society, to counter the hostility of the regime with the best of intentions, and defuse hate with love.

As we all know, reform and opening up brought about development of the state and change in society. In my view, it began with abandoning “taking class struggle as the key link,” which had been the ruling principle of the Mao era. We committed ourselves instead to economic development and social harmony. The process of abandoning the “philosophy of struggle” was one of gradually diluting the mentality of enmity, eliminating the psychology of hatred, and pressing out the “wolf’s milk” in which our humanity had been steeped. It was this process that provided a relaxed environment for the reform and opening up at home and abroad, for the restoration of mutual love between people, and soft humane soil for the peaceful coexistence of different values and different interests, and thus provided the explosion of popular creativity and the rehabilitation of warmheartedness with incentives consistent with human nature. Externally abandoning “anti-imperialism and anti-revisionism”, and internally, abandoning “class struggle” may be called the basic premise of the continuance of China’s reform and opening up to this day. The market orientation of the economy; the cultural trend toward diversity; and the gradual change of order to the rule of law, all benefited from the dilution of this mentality of enmity. Even in the political field, where progress is slowest, dilution of the mentality of enmity also made political power ever more tolerant of diversity in society, the intensity persecution of dissidents has declined substantially, and characterization of the 1989 movement has changed from an “instigated rebellion” to a “political upheaval.”

The dilution of the mentality of enmity made the political power gradually accept the universality of human rights. In 1998, the Chinese government promised the world it would sign the the two international human rights conventions of the UN, marking China’s recognition of universal human rights standards; in 2004, the National People’s Congress for the first time inscribed into the constitution that “the state respects and safeguards human rights”, signaling that human rights had become one of the fundamental principles of the rule of law. In the meantime, the present regime also proposed “putting people first” and “creating a harmonious society”, which signalled progress in the Party’s concept of rule.

This macro-level progress was discernible as well in my own experiences since being arrested.

While I insist on my innocence, and that the accusations against me are unconstitutional, in the year and more since I lost my freedom, I’ve experienced two places of detention, four pre-trial police officers, three prosecutors and two judges. In their handling of the case, there has been no lack of respect, no time overruns and no forced confessions. Their calm and rational attitude has over and again demonstrated goodwill. I was transferred on 23 June from the residential surveillance to Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau Detention Center No. 1, known as “Beikan.” I saw progress in surveillance in the six months I spent there.

I spent time in the old Beikan (Banbuqiao) in 1996, and compared with the Beikan of a decade ago, there has been great improvement in the hardware of facilities and software of management.

In particular, Beikan’s innovative humane management based on respecting the rights and dignity of detainees, implementing more flexible management of the will be flexible to the detainees words and deeds, embodied in the Warm broadcast and Repentance, the music played before meals, and when waking up and going to sleep, gave detainees feelings of dignity and warmth, stimulating their consciousness of keeping order in their cells and opposing the warders sense of themselves as lords of the jail, detainees, providing not only a humanized living environment, but greatly improved the detainees’ environment and mindset for litigation, I had close contact with Liu Zhen, in charge of my cell. People feel warmed by his respect and care for detainees, reflected in the management of every detail, and permeating his every word and deed. Getting to know the sincere, honest, responsible, good-hearted Liu Zhen really was a piece of good luck for me in Beikan.

Political beliefs are based on such convictions and personal experiences; I firmly believe that China’s political progress will never stop, and I’m full of optimistic expectations of freedom coming to China in the future, because no force can block the human desire for freedom. China will eventually become a country of the rule of law in which human rights are supreme. I’m also looking forward to such progress being reflected in the trial of this case, and look forward to the full court’s just verdict ——one that can stand the test of history.

Ask me what has been my most fortunate experience of the past two decades, and I’d say it was gaining the selfless love of my wife, Liu Xia. She cannot be present in the courtroom today, but I still want to tell you, sweetheart, that I’m confident that your love for me will be as always. Over the years, in my non-free life, our love has contained bitterness imposed by the external environment, but is boundless in afterthought. I am sentenced to a visible prison while you are waiting in an invisible one. Your love is sunlight that transcends prison walls and bars, stroking every inch of my skin, warming my every cell, letting me maintain my inner calm, magnanimous and bright, so that every minute in prison is full of meaning. But my love for you is full of guilt and regret, sometimes heavy enough hobble my steps. I am a hard stone in the wilderness, putting up with the pummeling of raging storms, and too cold for anyone to dare touch. But my love is hard, sharp, and can penetrate any obstacles. Even if I am crushed into powder, I will embrace you with the ashes.

Given your love, sweetheart, I would face my forthcoming trial calmly, with no regrets about my choice and looking forward to tomorrow optimistically. I look forward to my country being a land of free expression, where all citizens’ speeches are treated the same; here, different values, ideas, beliefs, political views… both compete with each other and coexist peacefully; here, majority and minority opinions will be given equal guarantees, in particular, political views different from those in power will be fully respected and protected; here, all political views will be spread in the sunlight for the people to choose; all citizens will be able to express their political views without fear, and will never be politically persecuted for voicing dissent; I hope to be the last victim of China’s endless literary inquisition, and that after this no one else will ever be jailed for their speech.

Freedom of expression is the basis of human rights, the source of humanity and the mother of truth. To block freedom of speech is to trample on human rights, to strangle humanity and to suppress the truth.

I do not feel guilty for following my constitutional right to freedom of expression, for fulfilling my social responsibility as a Chinese citizen. Even if accused of it, I would have no complaints. Thank you!

Liu Xiaobo (December 23, 2009)

#liu xiaobo #quotes

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limejuicer1862 · 6 years ago

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Wombwell Rainbow Interviews

I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me. I gave the writers two options: an emailed list of questions or a more fluid interview via messenger.

The usual ground is covered about motivation, daily routines and work ethic, but some surprises too. Some of these poets you may know, others may be new to you. I hope you enjoy the experience as much as I do.

Heather Derr-Smith

is a poet with four books, Each End of the World (Main Street Rag Press, 2005), The Bride Minaret (University of Akron Press, 2008), Tongue Screw (Spark Wheel Press, 2016), and Thrust winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor’s Choice Award (Persea Books, 2017). Her work has appeared in Fence, Crazy Horse and Missouri Review. She is managing director of Cuvaj Se, a nonprofit supporting writers in conflict zones and post-conflict zones and divides her time mostly between Iowa and Sarajevo, Bosnia.

The Interview

1. When and why did you start writing poetry?

I often say my inspiration to write poetry came from the movie Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders. I remember that film as instigating me to make a declaration of knowing how I wanted to live my life and what I wanted to “do.” It was an epiphany. I wanted to be one of the angels, listening and observing, but also I wanted to be like the angel who chose to become human to experience the world, fall in love even with all its pain. I realized I loved the world. I realized there was a world outside of myself to love. This was a coming of age moment for me, at about sixteen.

But also I was inspired all along by language, a fascination with words, a desire to create a self that had been fractured by trauma in childhood and into adulthood. I have early memories of writing every word I knew all over the church bulletin. There was scripture and gospel songs with weird images and the preaching. I hated my religious upbringing for its authoritarianism and it’s deep immorailty as it paved the way for what we see now in Trump. But the language of the scripture and the hymns I loved very much.

2. Who introduced you to poetry?

Our home had no books, no literature. My parents came from poverty, were the first generation to rise out of poverty, but were not college-educated. My mother drove the right-wing religious climate in the home, and she and my stepfather drove the right-wing political in concert. I’d say the psalms were he first poems I heard. But I do remember an antique book my mother had called “A Child’s Garden of Verses” and I believe a poem I loved about having to go to bed early in summer when it’s still light out and the birds are singing and you want to play. But my first introduction to poetry in the sense we think of it had to have been the Smiths, with “Keats and Yeats are on your side–but Wilde is on mine.” which led me to ask who are Keats and Yeats? There was literature in school which I did love. The usual books we were required to read in middle school and into high school. I loved those. But I really loved the literature I found through the music I loved–The Stranger by Camus, from the Cure as another example. I found so much through references in the music of the time (the 80’s) but also I wrote poems based on song lyrics, impressionistic, associative, and to me these fragments which were based on song lyrics were my poems.

3. How aware are and were you of the dominating presence of older poets traditional and contemporary?

I had no older poets until I finally got to the University of Virginia. I ran away from home, was homeless for a while, got an apartment, waited tables, found my way to one year of Liberty University (the only way I could imagine going to college) then transferred after a year to the University of Virginia. Charles Wright, Rit Dove, and Greg Orr were teachers then. I had no idea who they were. You had to apply to get into their undergraduate workshops. I did and got in and started writing poetry. I knew nothing. I did not know the graduate students. I wasn’t very well educated because I had endured so much trauma in high school in and out of the home, that I really wasn’t learning much formally. I only knew my teachers, who I loved; my peers, who I also loved; and I got to know poets in books: Philip Levine, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Li-Young Lee. I applied to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and had no idea what it was all about. I just knew if you were a poet you were supposed to go to Iowa, so I applied and went.

There I loved my teachers, Mark Doty and Marvin Bell especially, Jorie Graham. The ones I didn’t love I still learned from. I did not know any other poets outside of class. I didn’t got to AWP. There was no social media.

4. What is your daily writing routine?

I have notebooks I keep in a stack on a table in my bedroom. Each notebook is labeled with projects I’m working on. One is “Arabic” for learning arabic, “Bosnian” for writing poems in Bosnian, “french” for writing poems in french. Then titles of book projects “Heathen” for gender identity stuff. “Violence” for exploring ideas about violence in writing–boxing, war–resistance etc. I have a “commonplace book” which is fragments and notes from my reading. I do not write every single day, but I am mindful of always engaged in the process of writing. I trust my mind and heart to be absorbing, listening, taking in, attentive to the world. I take notes when I want to remember something specific, and I do my notebooks regularly enough–maybe just 15 minutes a day for a few days or a couple days out of the week, and over time I have a compilation of ideas, themes, lines, words, images, etc. There’s always something connected to writing that I do every day because it’s all connected to writing–watching a film, reading the news, corresponding with friends or loves, looking at art, listening to music, loving my animal friends, al of it goes into my work. I just strive for balance like breathing–taking in and breathing out, active creation and restful re-creation.

5. What motivates you to write?

It seems to be something I have to do and was born to do. It feels inherent to me and myself. It feels like a whole way of being.

6. What is your work ethic?

I work hard. I love to work. I’m satisfied in my labor. At first I would have been driven to work in my home life with chores and a high level of parentification–a drive to meet the emotional and psychological needs of the adults around me, which meant trying hard to please and trying hard not to get in trouble. Then I revolted against the abuse at home and said “Fuck this!” and left. But with my friends who had also experienced a lot of trauma, were runaways, homeless etc. we created our own families and had to work. We were so young, 15, 16, 17 and up. And it wasn’t perfect and we retraumatized one another in many ways, but it was honestly better for my spirit and my mind and heart than homelife had been.

So I found a way to be proud of my own labor and that has stuck with me. Now I’m 48 and I am a big big believer in NOT doing things. I believe in canceling, saying no, not leaving the house, and not being “productive.” I believe in naps, sitting quietly, and snuggling the dogs. I still like being productive and working hard but I do not like striving at all. Striving to “make it” that feeling that this could “lead to something” bigger, better. Nope nope nope.

I spent some time in an Amish-mennonite community and I liked the idea of work as sacramental, mopping floors, working in the garden, caring for children and animals and others as a way of connecting and loving, not trying so much to amass wealth or be “productive” in the capitalist sense. That has stuck with me.

7. How do the writers you read when you were young influence you today?

Sylvia Plath’s rage and violence are still something in my poems that I’m interested in exploring. Berryman’s weird syntax which also connects to Shakespeare and the Bible. Charles Wright’s similes and metaphors and stringing together images with a colloquial bit of diction, with a quote from a philosopher. Larry Levis’ “I” who is deeply empathetic and wanders ut from his own self into the wider world.Mark Doty’s ethics and authenticity of emotion. These are all things still with me.

8. Whom of today’s writers do you admire the most and why?

I admire so many. I think it would be impossible to name them, they just keep coming. Twitter has been a boon and a curse. I’ve managed to curate my twitter in such a way that I am surrounded by a really wonderful, diverse, generous, community of writers at all stages in their callings. I learn from all of them every day. I hate to name names because then I will leave someone out. There are at least hundreds, if not thousands. It’s a little overwhelming. But certain books have been particularly groundbreaking for me in the last couple years. I would say Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic is one, Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s Rocket fantastic is another and Justin Phillip Reed’s Indecency. Those three have just blown open so many doors I want to hang out a while in those rooms.

9. Tell me about the writing projects you have on at the moment.

I keep working on my non-profit, Cuvaj se/Take Care. I’ve chosen to spend a great deal of my time and energy the last few decades facilitating poetry workshops in conflict zones and post-conflict zones and communities affected by trauma and violence. I started back in 1994 while I was learning about poetry and the war in Bosnia was culminating in genocide. I went over to volunteer in a refugee camp and I made a lifelong commitment to that country through more than twenty years of ongoing recovery. All of my earnings from poetry go into this work and all of the work has been self funded, and expanded to other countries, including Syria, and most recently Ukraine. I started the non-profit so that I could apply for grants to help build capacity and do more. We do poetry workshops that emphasize lgbtq rights, human rights, interethnic cooperation, migrant rights, critical thinking etc. and we also fund writers with grants to support their work, fundraise for emergency/critical financial support, and translation. Donations to Cuvaj se from individual donors always goes directly to writers or students in need to support their work. Running a non-profit is new to me, and I’m learning as I go and I’m taking it slow. https://cuvajse.org/

My fifth manuscript is to be published in 2021, but I can’t say anything more about that yet! There’s a lot in it about gender, seuality, violence, and God, my familiar themes (or demons? I like that use of a familiar) I remain obsessed with. But I am happy for the amount of time I have to really dig in hard with revisions and to make it the strongest book I can write. I don’t move on to the next book until I get the present one published–so every bit of my energy and strength will go into it.

I’m also having so much fun making poetry videos. I was hugely inspired by Agnes Varda and have been making these little clips of poems, readings, with sometimes goofy video. I love it and I want to take a film class and learn how to make more and better ones. I don’t care if they are amateurish or seem unpolished. I learned from Agnes varda just to do what you love and give your heart to it and learn as you go. I think this is the link to subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChhjf1Vp_5o6siKsuhv_G0A?view_as=subscriber My poetry website is here: https://heatherderrsmith.com/

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews: Heather Derr-Smith Wombwell Rainbow Interviews I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me.

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thewebofslime · 6 years ago

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San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi, a renowned advocate for the accused and an outspoken watchdog on police misconduct, has died. He was 59. Mayor London Breed confirmed Friday night that Adachi had died, saying that San Francisco had “lost a dedicated public servant.” He was the only elected public defender in California. The exact circumstances and cause of Adachi’s death were not immediately known, but sources said he died of a heart attack. “As one of the few elected public defenders in our country, Jeff always stood up for those who didn’t have a voice, have been ignored and overlooked, and who needed a real champion,” Breed said in a statement. “He was committed not only to the fight for justice in the courtroom, but he was also a relentless advocate for criminal justice reform. “Jeff led the way on progressive policy reforms, including reducing recidivism, ending cash bail, and standing up for undocumented and unrepresented children.” Related Stories LOCAL HEATHER KNIGHT, CHRONICLE STAFF WRITER Jeff Adachi, crusader behind Prop. B pension plan LOCAL BY MATIER & ROSS Jeff Adachi to L.A.? He says no Adachi’s colleagues were in shock and mourning the city’s loss. Deputy Public Defender Eric Quandt called his boss “a true visionary for equal rights and criminal justice.” “I’ve never seen a defense lawyer more tenacious or courageous,” Quandt said. “He made the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office one of the premier law firms in the nation. I’m so proud to have had the opportunity to work under his guidance. I’m devastated. I’m sure I’m speaking for many of my colleagues.” He is remembered as being a firebrand — an intense and tenacious man who delved deeply into the subjects he cared about, regardless of what anyone else thought. From a young age, he enjoyed solitary pursuits, like writing and reading, he told The Chronicle in 2010. He went on to study business at Sacramento City College before transferring to UC Berkeley. He graduated from UC Hastings College of the Law in 1985. A year later, the Public Defender’s Office hired him. Adachi had been sworn in for another term as a public defender in January after running unopposed. Unlike other city department heads who focus on management, Adachi would regularly step up and defend clients himself. In December, he won an acquittal for Carlos Argueta, an immigrant rights attorney who faced a murder charge. “I am deeply saddened by the unexpected news today,” said city District Attorney George Gascón. “Jeff was a passionate and relentless advocate who always fought hard for what he believed in. He represented the underserved and gave his career to public service.” State Sen. Scott Wiener remembered Adachi as a man of his word, one who “fought like a dog for what he believed in for his clients.” “I always knew that everything he said or did came from the heart,” Wiener said. “He was someone who, it didn’t matter to him what people thought about him or if people were mad at him. He was there to fight for the most marginalized people in society.” Adachi’s passion for social justice extended outside of City Hall, too, to documentary filmmaking. His films, “You Don’t Know Jack: The Jack Soo Story” (2009) and “The Slanted Screen” (2006), examined the challenges Asian American actors faced in Hollywood. “Defender” (2017), co-directed by Jim Choi, used a case Adachi defended to examine racial inequities in the criminal justice system. Each of the films were shown in film festivals. Former Supervisor Bevan Dufty, who now serves on the BART Board of Directors, knew Adachi for more than 20 years and remembered him as a ferocious advocate. He was well known at City Hall for fighting for more money for his budget. “He really tried to see the big picture in promoting services and approaches to reducing recidivism,” Dufty said. “I really felt like (Adachi) had a vision that was needed to reduce the involvement of poor people in the justice system. I didn’t always agree with him, but I always appreciated that he made this job so much bigger than what the charter called for. He had a great sense of humor.” Every year, Adachi’s office wore T-shirts in San Francisco’s Gay Pride Parade that read, ‘Getting People Off Since 1921.” Adachi also published an annual calendar featuring pictures of his lawyers. “He wasn’t somebody who tried to stay under the radar,” Dufty said. “He was proud of the work he did, he cared deeply about his clients, and he was an important part of the reform movement in our justice system.” Supervisor Hillary Ronen said she was devastated by the loss. “He made so many of us feel safe,” she said. “For people of color, they knew that no matter how bad things got, they had the fiercest advocate who would always stand by their side. He was one of a kind.” Ronen’s husband, Francisco Ugarte, worked in Adachi’s office representing undocumented immigrants. Rep. Jackie Speier, D-San Mateo, whose district includes part of San Francisco, called Adachi “the real deal ... a righteous public servant who believed passionately in the Constitution, due process and the rights of the accused to be ably represented by counsel. He did not shrink from public debate or tough political decisions.” “The last time I saw him he was at a political event decked out in a beautiful jacket for Halloween, and it was 8 a.m. in the morning,” she said in a statement. “My prayers go out to his family at this painful and numbing time. The community of San Francisco will envelop you and give you strength. God bless you.” Adachi took great pride in being an elected public defender, saying it gave him an independence he wouldn’t have if he was appointed by someone. “Letting voters elect a public defender has dramatic, real-world advantages,” he wrote in a March 2018 letter to the Los Angeles Times to take issue with an editorial in that paper saying electing public defenders was not necessary. “Because I’m elected, I’ve been able to publicly advocate for proper funding — even refusing cases — without fear of being fired by the mayor or board of supervisors,” he wrote. “We’ve been able to hire social workers for families and immigration specialists to fight deportation and re-entry staff to bring down recidivism. That’s something that benefits all San Franciscans, not just those charged with crimes.”

#TheWebOfSlime

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creativesage · 6 years ago

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(via Solomon Darwin Takes Corporate Innovation to Rural Villages in India)

The UC professor, born into the so-called group of India’s “untouchables,” thinks one great idea can change rural lives, and is proving it with his Smart Village Movement.

By Patrick Hoge

Solomon Darwin was born in a rural village in southeast India to a family of so-called “untouchables,” a group of people designated by the Hindu religion as cursed because of sins in former lives and thus historically subject to poverty, discrimination, and oppression.

Darwin nevertheless went on to successful careers in U.S. banking and academia after his family converted to Christianity and moved to California, where he was able to get an education. He’s now a UC Berkeley professor.

“America has been extremely beautiful for me,” said Darwin, an unassuming man with jet-black hair, bushy eyebrows, beard, and mustache as well as jarringly intense eyes and a kindly voice. “The equal opportunity which I experienced in America brought me into prominence because it has given me the chance to prove myself. It’s a place where hard work can be rewarded.”

A life of comfort and ease, however, was not Darwin’s reward. Instead, Darwin has embraced personal sacrifices and threats from Hindu extremists to spread prosperity in his former homeland, particularly for those at the bottom of society.

As an academic, Darwin has become an increasingly influential promoter of U.S.-India ties, meeting with government officials up to India’s president and prime minister, and becoming the leader of a Smart Village Movement that aims to bring technological and economic development to India’s rural villages. There are some 650,000 such villages in India, and they are home to nearly 70 percent of the country’s 1.3 billion citizens.

Though virtually all of his extended family long ago emigrated to the United States, Darwin has also consistently gone back to his native village of Mori Podu on the Bay of Bengal, a town of 8,000 where he built and runs a school, an orphanage, and a hospital, all of which serve the poor and outcast, regardless of religious persuasion or social status.

“We are all blessed because of him,” said Harish Pindi, a 27-year-old Mori native who attended Darwin’s Riverside International School. He recently graduated in computer science from California State University, Northridge, and now lives in Fremont. Pindi recalled Riverside as an egalitarian oasis, and said Darwin counseled him to success when he almost failed college.

Darwin explained his motivation to help others by quoting Abraham Lincoln’s adage that almost anyone can go through life’s challenges and succeed, but gaining power will truly test a person’s character.

“I see lot of old friends, even my own relatives, and they are so forgetful and lacking in gratitude now in America. Remember where you came from,” he said. “Even to today I am always remembering.”

This year, Darwin published two books. One, The Untouchables: Three Generations of Triumph Over Torment, is about his own family’s journey over three generations to escape caste oppression. The other, The Road to Mori: Smart Villages of Tomorrow, is about his campaign to digitally empower villages, which, over the past couple of years, has been officially adopted by two Indian states and received support from numerous universities and tech corporations like San Jose’s PayPal, Google in Mountain View, and Ericsson, Sweden’s networking and telecommunications giant.

PayPal chief technical officer Sri Shivananda, for example, dispatched staff to work with Darwin’s students in Mori interviewing local citizens about how to help them sell saris, cashews, and other goods over the internet.

Ericsson in May was touting how it has developed applications of sensor technology in Mori to help shrimp farmers improve harvests and improve water distribution.

Those efforts have already produced tangible benefits for Mori’s residents, and last year the state of Andhra Pradesh approved funding to help Darwin spread similar innovations to the rest of its 470-plus villages, said Venkatesan Ashok, India’s consul general in San Francisco.

“We saw how the villagers were thriving with the improvements that had come in,” Ashok said. “We need many Solomon Darwins to make change in India.”

Andhra Pradesh has given Darwin the honorary title of chief innovation officer. In June, the state of Arunachal Pradesh near the Himalayas in the northeast followed suit with its own deal to develop Smart Villages, shortly after Darwin hosted state officials in the Bay Area and introduced them to executives at PayPal’s headquarters. Darwin is now planning a trip with UC Berkeley students for next year.

Throughout, Darwin has continued to raise money for his school, hospital, and orphanage he started in Mori, relying heavily on church and service groups, like Rotary clubs, which have provided cash, materials, and volunteer services.

Vivek Wadwha, a distinguished fellow at Harvard Law School and Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering at Silicon Valley, said what Darwin has accomplished both personally and professionally is “incredible.”

“These are complete extremes,” said Wadwha, who met Darwin about a decade ago through another academic but did not know until recently that Darwin was born into India’s Hindu underclass. “You are talking about going from the poorest of the poor in India to the height of academia in Silicon Valley. How does that happen? He didn’t hit the lottery. He worked his way to where he is.”

Darwin was born a member of India’s scavenger caste, the members of which have historically been expected to take jobs like cleaning public toilets and sewers, burying the dead, or working virtually as indentured rural slaves. Such “untouchables,” also called Dalits by activists, are among an estimated 200 million people that the government designates as “scheduled castes,” and though affirmative action programs exist and discrimination was officially banned when India adopted its constitution in 1950, prejudice remains, economic opportunities are often limited, and incidents of oppressive violence continue. Deaths of Dalit men manually cleaning out sewage equipment have been commonplace in recent years, for example, even though the practice was outlawed in 2013, and inter-caste marriage provokes killings.

Fortunately for Darwin, he had a remarkable role model of resilience and entrepreneurism in his grandmother, a woman known as Subbamma, who rejected caste distinctions, converted to Christianity and ran restaurants, a lace-making export business and a community bank while also acting as schoolteacher and midwife to countless local children.

“Entrepreneurship is a liberator. That’s what my grandmother proved,” Darwin said.

Opportunity proved nonexistent for Darwin’s academically inclined father, however. He could not find a job despite completing an advanced degree in marine science — a fact he attributed to caste discrimination.

Incredibly, Darwin’s father eventually got hired by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, and after four years’ separation, Darwin and his mother joined him in La Jolla. The family later relocated to San Bruno.

Equipped with at best a fifth-grade education, Darwin was overwhelmed by culture shock and depression. He tearfully pleaded his way into community college, working as a janitor at the school. Three years later, he transferred to San Francisco State University, where he got a bachelor’s degree, proceeding then to get an MBA from Golden Gate University in San Francisco.

Darwin got a job as a financial analyst for Motorola Inc. in San Mateo, worked at a bank in Tulsa, Okla., and then got a job at Glendale Federal Bank in Southern California working as a cost accountant in a crowded basement in a warehouse-like building. In his spare time, he wrote a report identifying how to cut costs.

The report made its way to the bank’s president, who pulled Darwin from obscurity and sent him to Harvard University for an executive training program. When Darwin returned in 1984, he was named corporate controller for GlenFed and given a corner office with a stunning view of the Glendale hills and spreading metropolis.

Darwin bought some nice suits. He worked a lot, went to church, bought a large new house.

Then, in 1988, Darwin’s grandmother died, and the trajectory of Darwin’s life again changed dramatically. Subbamma had come in her twilight years to live near relatives. In her final days, she asked Darwin to take her body back to Mori Podu for burial. Darwin told her he could not commit to making that journey, as he was very busy, but his boss urged him to go.

o in 1988, Darwin traveled with Subbamma’s embalmed body by airplane, rail, truck, rickshaw, and finally in a small boat poled by hand across the Godavari River.

Darwin had not been back to Mori Podu since the age of 15. When the boat carrying Subbamma’s casket landed at the water’s edge, hundreds of people were waiting for her arrival. One held a sign in Telugu reading “Subbamma, a friend of the poor.”

Upon returning to the United States, Darwin sold his big house and moved into a communal home for Christian missionaries in Pasadena, where he shared a room with four other men. He sent his savings to Mori to begin rebuilding Subbamma’s mud hut school.

On the professional front, Darwin continued to advance, ultimately becoming a senior vice president of corporate finance for Bank of America in San Francisco. But when the bank was sold to NationsBank and the headquarters was moved to Charlotte, N.C., Darwin resigned. He had fallen in love with a ballet dancer of Swedish descent whom he met at his church, and the two got married and moved to Mori to supervise construction of the school and an orphanage on land Darwin bought when an upper caste farmer had a heart attack and needed money. It opened in 1996 and today serves nearly 800 students a year. The nearby medical center Darwin built similarly sits on land from which Darwin recalled being chased as a child by an upper caste man who yelled that he was unclean.

Darwin moved back to Southern California when his wife was going to give birth. He was broke and exhausted, but one day received a call from former Harvard Business School professor Ken Merchant, who had tracked him down to offer him a teaching position at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. Elated, Darwin worked at USC for nine years, where Merchant said he was an outstanding teacher, before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley.

Today, Darwin and his wife, with whom he has three children, live in Pacifica. He is executive director of the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation, part of Haas’ Institute for Business Innovation.

From that perch, Darwin teaches about business innovation, hosts conferences to promote U.S.-India commerce, the most recent being in September, and supervises student research aimed at using technology and global trade to develop villages around the world, where 3.4 billion live.

“I’m very excited about the work I’m doing. Otherwise, I would be depressed. Most of my life, I’ve had a lot of setbacks. At times, I have not wanted to live anymore,” Darwin said. “At this moment, God has blessed me to a point where I can give something back.”

It’s not all roses, Darwin is quick to point out. Caste and intersectarian tensions in India remain, with violence and other outrages occurring regularly. Despite his own accomplishments, Darwin feels discrimination from Hindus in India and in the Bay Area.

Darwin’s name has even appeared on a Hindu radical target list.

As a result, Darwin said he is careful about broadcasting his whereabouts when he’s in India, and his goal is never to inflame opposition, though he has taken stands at times to ensure staff at his school treat students equally regardless of caste.

“I want to live peaceably with everyone and work with everyone no matter who they are,” he said.

[Entire article — click on the title link to read it at Oakland Magazine.]

***

We’re glad that “new Silicon Valleys,” or place-specific innovation centers, are growing all over the world, at least in terms of innovation and the development of creative economy ecosystems — and we would love to visit them all! We all learn best by exchanging ideas across cultures and industries. We fully support complete diversity in the workplace, and overcoming the inequality challenges that are still too prevalent in our world.

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We also work on workplace culture issues, leadership challenges, handling transitions, and building resilience in organizations and individual clients. You’ll be able to see first-hand how Silicon Valley companies create a culture of creativity and innovation, and you’ll be able to talk with their leaders. We’ll arrange a customized tour for you that addresses your organization’s issues.

We can design additional customized programs and tours for individuals, families, work teams, university students and faculty, including those in undergraduate or graduate entrepreneurship or MBA programs, and other special interest groups, such as the charitable tourism activities.

Join our email list and visit our web site, or call: (510) 845-5510 for more information.

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***

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