Linkin Park – Hands Held High Travis McCoy ft. Bruno Mars – Billionaire Eminem – Not Afraid Woodie Guthrie – This Land is My Land Flobots – Handlebars Wiz Khalifa ft 2 Chainz – We Own It William Shakespeare – Sonnet 116 Anne Lamott – Graduation Speech Anne Lamott - Bird by Bird David Foster Wallace […]
Continue reading →Today, at noon, I’m giving a presentation to a group of Fellows on public speaking. I’ll talk a lot tomorrow about tactics. About writing out every word of a speech by hand your first few times to make sure the words live in your head. About standing on one foot and wiggling before you go on […]
Continue reading →I work at an organization that combats human trafficking, and one of the ways we do that is by serving the survivors of that horror. There are amazing social workers who help our clients find ESL classes, vocational training, housing, jobs, benefits, healthcare, legal help, pretty much everything a person needs to rebuild her (and […]
Continue reading →I spent a lot of last week reading about the foster care system (400,000 U.S. minors are involved in it each year (pdf)) and I’m going to be talking about child welfare reform for a few months. Following up on 6 months working on Safe Harbor laws which enable the criminal justice system to direct child […]
Continue reading →One of my friends is highlighted on page 96 of this week’s Cosmo for the brave op-ed she wrote about body shaming in the American University gym, that lead to a change in policy and got media attention: Extra credit: I took that pic of her. So buy a copy, skip past all of pictures of […]
Continue reading →I got interviewed last summer by a reporter working on an article for Newsweek and the article just came out. I’m not ok with everything in the article (and I did not say anything ominously) but it’s nice to be considered a valuable source of information on living in the Middle East. Enjoy! Inspirational Quote: “If you […]
Continue reading →Today I gave a presentation in my “Modern Arabic Literature” class on state-censorship. Well, first I put on a play, using some scenes from the frame narrative of Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero (slides 8 and 9 include the relevant text), then used the slides below to dig deeper into the text. In the […]
Continue reading →I read a great deal of fanfiction last week. I had most of last week off for Carnival and finished my 5th year project: To celebrate finishing this anthology, which I have stressed about for longer than possibly anything but getting into college, I spent a few days diving into a fandom I haven’t spent much […]
Continue reading →I have some experience in two formal styles of greeting etiquette (four if you include Dickens Faire Victorian and Renaissance Faire Tudor, which I’m not) which disagree on the polite way to hand something to someone. In a Shito-Ryu Karate Do dojo, when you want to give or take something respectfully, you do it with two hands and a […]
Continue reading →This semester I made a scary decision: I scheduled my class in a computer lab. I’ve very rarely had good classes in computer labs, mostly because my instructors get snappier and snappier the more they tried to control what their students were doing on the computers. I have a natural rhythm when working on a […]
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