catchen's Xanga

is it too late to start again?

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:05:37 GMT

hellooooooo out there!

i know, i know, i probably scared all of you by ceasing to blog with a post that's 18 months old talking about how i was sick with amoebic dysentery. Since then, a few updates:

1) I recovered, thanks to Flagyl, the worst medicine on earth.
2) I got engaged.
3) We adopted a street mutt.
4) I got married.
5) I changed jobs (still working with children but no longer "saving them" per se)
6) We moved back to the States.

I guess this is what happens when I don't blog for a long time. In other news, we just got back from an extended weekend in Cabo, where I discovered that sometimes, normal people hire STYLISTS! And now, naturally, I'm obsessed with the idea of finding a stylist in DC. Barring that, perhaps I'll become one in my free time to assist the numerous women in DC who, like me, believe that there must be stylish options for professional women in their 30s that are neither Lindsay Lohan on her 21st birthday, nor a junior senator at her first hearing.

any suggestions?

memoires of an invalid

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 07:19:46 GMT

so I'm sick. like really sick. like, i haven't been to work in a week sick. i went to the international health clinic here in town on Wednesday and it appears that I have "an amoeba." Or try 100,000 amoebas all trying to eat out my insides.

so the doctor put me on Flagyl, which really should go down as the worst medicine in history...if not for the horrible headaches it gives you, than for the fact that my tongue feels like its been wrapped in tin foil and of course, being the incessant googler that I am... I looked up amoebas and found this article about giant brain-eating amoebas! http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21034344/

i should be back among the living in about a week.... but man. I'm never eating salad in this country again.

Coming home to....away?

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 00:46:15 GMT

Happy New Year!

I'm back in Jakarta after almost 3 weeks in California and Texas, visiting family, friends, eating tons of good food, enjoying the weather (although it was a bit freezing for my taste) and driving a car(!) which I haven't done in more than 6 months.

I'll admit that when I left Jakarta for California, I was a bit apprehensive -- would I want to come back to the "Big Durian" after a few weeks of blue skies, great food, Peet's coffee and NPR? But now that I'm back... I can't quite explain how happy Jakarta, and Indonesia in general, makes me. The first mutters of Bahasa Indonesia that I heard a grandma saying to her granddaughter at the Taipei airport made my heart jump and when I landed and walked off the plane in Jakarta, the humid (slightly stinky) air was a weirdly welcoming sensation after three weeks of cold drying up my skin. :)

I'm beginning to realize that even though Indonesia is perpetually foreign to me... somehow it has become home in the last six months. The unexpected, yet totally expected, traffic that pops up, the busy-ness of the streets where 20 million people live and eek out a living, the street kids who walk up and down the street near my house with their empty burlap bags asking for food and money, the rhythms and sounds of my colleagues talking to each other in a language that I have yet to grasp....somehow this has become home, and I love it.

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 05:33:36 GMT

Okay, i realize this isn't the kind of posting you want from me..... but I just found this out, so thought I'd pass it along for any of you who are craving a new iPod this Christmas....p.s. you like how the date is 2005, and I'm just finding out about this NOW? sigh.

Apple Announces Free iPod Recycling Program at US Retail Stores

Customers Offered 10 Percent Discount on New iPod Purchases

CUPERTINO, California—June 3, 2005—Apple® announced a free recycling program for iPod®, the world’s most popular digital music player. Beginning today, customers can bring iPods they no longer want to any of Apple’s 100 retail stores in the US for free environmentally friendly disposal, and those who drop off an iPod, iPod mini or iPod photo will receive a 10 percent discount on the purchase of a new iPod that day.

iPods received for recycling in the US are processed domestically and no hazardous material is shipped overseas. More details of Apple’s worldwide recycling programs are available at apple.com/environment

Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning desktop and notebook computers, OS X operating system, and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital music revolution with its iPod portable music players and iTunes online music store.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 00:26:50 GMT

Greetings from Aceh!

It's Thursday morning here in Indonesia, and it's a beautiful day outside. Not a cloud in the sky - which is really rare during rainy season! I'm working out in our district office for the week. On one side, we're neighbors to a group of families who are still living in temporary baracks after the tsunami because people stole their land, and on the other side, there's a huge flooded rice field, where I watch the kids from the baracks go hunt for frogs every afternoon. One of my favorite things about this office is that you have to take off your shoes to enter the office, which I'm convinced leads to a more relaxed way of working. :) I've been training part of our team all week, and it is definitely a weird thing to stand up in front of everyone with no shoes on. What a departure from life in DC! hahahahaha.

Hope all of you are enjoying time with family and friends this Thanksgiving. I, for one, am sleeping in a staff guest house and have been living on tahu goreng (fried tofu) and a personal stash of apples, oranges and carrots for the last few days and am looking forward to being back in Jakarta soon. :)

oh maureen...

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 00:36:42 GMT

Interesting...not sure why she threw Hillary into the mix though.

NY Times

November 14, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist

Should Hillary Pretend to Be a Flight Attendant?

By MAUREEN DOWD

In 2005, a year after Ellie Grossman, a doctor, met Ray Fisman, a professor, on a blind date, she was talking to her grandmother about her guy.

“Never let a man think you’re smarter,” her grandmother advised. “Men don’t like that.”

Ray and Ellie “had a good laugh, thinking times had changed,” he recalled. The pair went on to marry — after she proposed.

But now, he says, “it seems like the students at Columbia University should pay heed to Grandma Lil’s advice.”

Mr. Fisman is a 36-year-old Columbia economics professor who conducted a two-year study, published last year, on dating. With two psychologists and another economist, he ran a speed-dating experiment at a local bar near the Columbia campus.

The results surprised him and made him a little sad because he found that even in the 21st century, many men are still straitjacketed in stereotypes.

“I guess I had hoped that they had evolved beyond this,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s like that ‘Sex and the City’ episode where Miranda went speed-dating. When she says she’s a lawyer, guys lose interest. Then she tells them she’s a flight attendant and that plays into their deepest fantasies.”

As he recapped the experiment in Slate last week:

“We found that men did put significantly more weight on their assessment of a partner’s beauty, when choosing, than women did. We also found that women got more dates when they won high marks for looks.”

He continued: “By contrast, intelligence ratings were more than twice as important in predicting women’s choices as men’s. It isn’t exactly that smarts were a complete turnoff for men: They preferred women whom they rated as smarter — but only up to a point ... It turns out that men avoided women whom they perceived to be smarter than themselves. The same held true for measures of career ambition — a woman could be ambitious, just not more ambitious than the man considering her for a date.

“When women were the ones choosing, the more intelligence and ambition the men had, the better. So, yes, the stereotypes appear to be true: We males are a gender of fragile egos in search of a pretty face and are threatened by brains or success that exceeds our own.”

Hillary Clinton, who is trying to crash through the Oval glass ceiling, may hope that we’re evolving into a kingdom of queen bees and their male slaves. But stories have been popping up that suggest that evolution is moving forward in a circuitous route, with lots of speed bumps.

Perhaps smart women can take hope — as long as they’re built like Marilyn Monroe. Scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Pittsburgh have released a zany study on the zaftig, positing that men are drawn to hourglass figures not only because they look alluring, but because hips plumped up by omega-3 fatty acids could mean smarter women bearing smarter kids.

Yet Alex Williams recently reported in The Times that the new income superiority of many young women in big cities is causing them to encounter “forms of hostility they weren’t prepared to meet,” leaving them “trying to figure out how to balance pride in their accomplishments against their perceived need to bolster the egos of the men they date.”

Professional women in their 20s are growing deft at subterfuges to protect the egos of dates who make less money, the story said, such as not leaving their shopping bags around and not mentioning their business achievements. Or they simply date older men who might not be as threatened.

Even though men and women in surveys often say that a salary gender gap doesn’t matter, in the real world it can play out differently — either because the man has subterranean resentment he can’t shed, or the woman equates it with a lack of male drive.

Evolution is lurching ahead unevenly at the office, as well. The Times’s Lisa Belkin wrote this month about the confusing array of signals for executive women that can leave them hamstrung.

Catalyst, an organization that studies women in the workplace, found that women who behave in ways that cleave to gender stereotypes — focusing on collegiality and relationships — are seen as less competent. But if they act too macho, they are seen as “too tough” and “unfeminine.”

Ms. Belkin said that another study shows that men — and female secretaries — are not considered less competent if they dress sexy at work, but female executives are.

Women still tend to be timid about negotiating salaries and raises. Men ask for more money at eight times the rate of women.

Victoria Brescoll, a Yale researcher, found that men who get angry at the office gain stature and clout, even as women who get angry lose stature because they are seen as out of control.

That may be why Obama is trying to get “fired up,” in the words of his fall slogan, while Hillary calmly observes that she can take the heat and stereotypically adds that she likes the kitchen.

london calling...

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 16:37:10 GMT

So I'm in London for the week for work. Got here Saturday early morning, and am in meetings and training for a week. I can't even begin to describe how nice it is to be able to WALK places! And to take public transportation! And to breath clean air (well, relatively clean anyway)! Yesterday, I spent the day wandering around the area north of Covent Garden where my hotel is located. And today, I hit up two museums (Victoria and Albert, and the Serpentine Gallery) and then hung out in Hyde Park lying on the grass in the sunshine while talking to my cousin Eric for about 2 hours, and then walked over to Harvey Nichols to do a little retail therapy. It's like the perfect combination of things I can't get in Jakarta: 1) clean air, 2) walking, 3) public transportation, 4) good shopping, and 5) beers, many, many, many beers, on tap.

sigh. i'm a happy kid right now. :)

Click to sign the petition

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 02:21:20 GMT

http://www.avaaz.org/en/stand_with_burma/tf.php?CLICK_TF_TRACK

To Chinese President Hu Jintao and the UN Security Council:

We stand alongside the citizens of Burma in their peaceful protests. We urge you to oppose a violent crackdown on the demonstrators, and to support genuine reconciliation and democracy in Burma. We pledge to hold you accountable for any further bloodshed.

the news we follow

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 01:31:56 GMT

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/world/asia/25cnd-myanmar.html?hp

so i checked the NYTimes website this morning... and the front cover picture was rotating between the Halo 3 launch, and new designer jeans. Argh. In the meantime, Burmese monks are making history with another day of pro-democracy marches. Man. I wish I was there.

the temples of angkor

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 02:17:11 GMT

I spent all of last week in Cambodia at a meeting, and then went to Siem Reap for the weekend to see the temples of Angkor. Take a look! 1. Angkor Wat on a hazy afternoon. 2. Ta Prohm - the famous Tomb Raider temple. 3. Bayon temple with hundreds of faces carved onto towers. 4. Banteay Srei - the Citadel of the Woman. 5. Buddhist monk on the top of Angkor Wat. 6. Chang and me - self portrait at Banteay Srei.