Jessy

I have no idea if it was significant or life-changing or, rather, if it was full of sound and fury signifying nothing, but today was really really something and (even if I don’t know what that is just yet) I have to write about it (even if my words never see the light of day) because it was an adventure and I’ve needed one of those for oh so very long and something somewhere saw that and gave it to me and it was absolutely the most.

For weeks now, I’ve been promising the #52weeks crew a spreadsheet charting our progress. After much, much longer than I had ever anticipated it would take me to complete the little spreadsheet that could, however, I’m happy to share the info I’ve collected, reflect on it, and give y’all the nitty gritty on why it took so. damned. long. to complete. 

It’s a good story, guys, I promise. 

For quite some time now, I’ve been flirting with the idea of learning how to code. Given that one of the jobs I want more than any other in this world will require a degree– or its equivalent, whatever that may be– in Computer Science, I’ve spent much of my free time lurking around Codecademy and Khan Academy learning bits and bobs here and there about coding. Not satisfied with just learning for the sake of learning, however, I wanted to challenge myself and really figure out if I had absorbed/mastered anything on my self-guided quest to learn coding. It couldn’t be too hard to write code that could pull raw data on #52weeks from the various blogging platforms we all use, after all, and that’s basically what APIs are for… right?

Well, all of that stuff about accessing and pulling data is what APIs are for, but I was so, so wrong. My quest to code a bit of something that would automate data collection for me– you know, so I didn’t have to go to everyone’s blog by myself and gather the information didn’t go very well. In fact, it didn’t go very far at all. 

One of the first problems I encountered was self-made: I sort of understood the concept of code, and could explain how things should work… but my execution of said code = absolute suckitude. The problem here, really, was that I needed more practice just familiarizing myself with the language, which is sort of hard because oh my god no big deal there are semicolons and parenthesis and how do you even get used to typing all of that it is SO unnatural and what the crap how am I ever going to get procedural fluency in this so I don’t spend 25 minutes writing each query and UGH guys I cannot even with this and really I just want to be good at it.

Yes, that’s exactly what went through my mind, and no, I am not mad about it because learning is hard and sometimes it requires struggle. Once I did get things sort-of working (much love to [darling] and the other engineer brains who hand-held me through the process), though, I had inconsistencies across the board as not every writer participating in our little project has been using the #52weeks tag on their posts, so I had to go back and manually parse data from each blog. When I started with the code-y things, I had hoped to avoid doing the manual data collection all together and to build something that would update itself once a week. And while I did have some fun messing around with the WordPress API and watching a friend squirm while explaining the concept of libraries (you are so cute when you squirm, boo) I have to tell you that its author(s) will never, ever, ever be on the list of my potential boyfriends because that shit is cray.

I may be just as cray as the WordPress API, btw, because I still have dreams of pulling data from our blogging platforms and from Twitter to visualize the activity on #52weeks all in one go. I’d love to parse out our collective data from everyone else using the tag, too, and to compare it all for shits and giggles to see what we can come up with. 

That being said, let’s take a little foray into the data, shall we? Because there’s nothing like a little bit of number crunching and visualization to help quantify progress towards a goal that is all at once individual and shared. 

First off, let’s take a look at the number. Here is a graph showing the average number of posts made per week since the beginning of the challenge. Given that we have 7 people participating in the challenge (Satnam, my data for you is incomplete boo, drop me your Tumblr pls!), and that we should each be posting once a week, we should as a group average 7 posts a week. 

As you can see from the numbers, that’s not what is happening; we tend to hover around 3 or 4 posts a week, with our highest week containing 12 .  As a group, we collectively write 0.66 posts per person per week, and we’ve collectively written 81 posts since the first week of the project though many of those posts are from a core group of prolific writers who average more than one posts a week.  Much like those pesky MOOCs out there (those Massive Open Online Courses),  though, our own homegrown little MOOC (Miniature Open Online Challenge) is suffering from a little bit of a retention problem, too, as we have some writers who have fallen off to the side.  And even though there are some things that skew our data a bit– we track weeks a little differently, for example- the numbers don’t lie too much, though they may be incomplete: our challenge isn’t quite sticking.

There is silver lining to be had, though: another dip into our data shows that over half of our group is making solid progress towards our goal. 

Four months in, we’re not quite where we should be, but as a group we are getting somewhere. Much of the responsibility for our success (and failure) is my own: as the thinker-upper of this idea, its execution rests squarely on my shoulders. Over the past few months, however, I have been dealing with some serious, real-life business that has prevented me from being able to focus on what we’re up to in our little corner of the web.

That being said, things have finally calmed down some, so if you’re writing for us or with us or if you want to join us (aren’t we a festive bunch?), keep an eye out for a few new challenge-related things to pop up on the radar as we count our way down from 52 posts in a year. 

Dearest Jennie,

Birthdays are all about celebration– celebrating the person who is marking another year of existence on the planet, and wishing them a happy journey to the next. Today is yours, and when I think about your birthday, and mine– and about the fact that we don’t know the actual date of the day we met, because duh, we were 10 and how were we supposed to know that the day we met was going to be one of the most important days of our lives?!– I can’t help feeling our birthdays are just the right time to celebrating all of the years we’ve had together.

I don’t know where the 18 years of our friendship have gone so quickly, or when the hell our friendship itself became old enough to be legally considered an adult (and vote!), but it has been one of the most important and defining relationships in my life. All I do know is that for the majority of my life, almost 2/3 of it now, you have been there for me, that you have loved me, and that you have been my biggest support and my confidante even when I may not have deserved it.You’ve been there for me when I have made good decisions, and you’ve been by my side when I’ve made some bad ones (good god have I made some bad ones) too. You’ve given me courage when I needed it the most. You know every single one of my secrets and my deepest fears and you know how lucky I am to still be here on this planet today. You’ve never abandoned me. You know everything about me and love me anyway. You are intelligent and insightful and caring and you are good at so very much and I am lucky to have you in my life at all.

Sometimes, when I think about it, it feels like we have done everything together.

We used to go to school together every morning– you’d pick me up in the Jetta– and we terrorized our little neighborhood every afternoon we could. (I fell in love with Phil in that car, remember? Damn, I miss those days.) We survived Madame McKnight’s French class together. We have sang every word of ever Spice Girls song ever together, and we can sing “Sous L’Ocean” too. We’ve made more last minute OMG THEY ARE GOING TO CLOSE STEP ON IT trips to Dairy Queen than we should ever admit, we’ve probably eaten everything Chik-fil-a’s menu has to offer. We’ve laughed, we’ve cried, we’ve been mad at each other, and hell, we’ve even gone months without speaking. Proms. Graduations. First apartments. Engagements. National crises. Family crises. The time the Spice Girls broke up.The time Destiny’s Child broke up (and then got back together!). The time Prince William got married to somene that wasn’t either of us. All of it, every single bit of it, we’ve been through together. We’ve driven too fast. We predicted PARIS 2012 together. We’ve lost people and pets we love. We’ve stressed over more broken friendships than we should ever count. We’ve nursed each other through broken hearts and broken engagements, and when one of us is too worn out to have faith that it’s all going to get better, we’ve always, always, always had the other to lean on.

Almost two decades later, we’re 3,000 miles apart and we are closer than ever. Not one single part of this crazy world or this crazy life looks anything like it did when we envisioned it as 10 and 11 year olds, but somehow all of that is totally okay though because we have each other. When I look back at the time we’ve had together, I can’t help thinking that it I’m so lucky to have you to get old with– because that’s what we’ve been doing for all this time, isn’t it really?– and that we are going to be two badass old ladies yelling at the kids these days to get off our lawns.

So, to my dearest, oldest friend who is eating a very sprinkle-covered indeed cake on her birthday, I wish you the happiest of birthdays. And in case you missed it– you are the absolute best, you are the most important partner in crime a girl could ever have, and most importantly, I love you always.

Love,

Jessy

xoxo

P.s. Um, what are we going to do when our friendship turns 21 and is old enough to legally drink?

In case the internet hasn’t said it yet, I’m going to say it here: This week was a no good, very bad week from hell and I would like for it to be gone, very, very much gone and over as soon as possible or else.

I haven’t quite figured out what the “or else” part of that statement should look like, but if you have any ideas, please let me know.

Somewhere around 11:30pm on Friday night, I lost my ability to cope with this very bad week. After pepper-spraying a would-be assailant on my way home from a birthday gathering, then spending the rest of the night locked in my apartment and on FaceTime with a friend, my Saturday wasn’t much in terms of productivity, either. And though I made it to church in one piece this morning (exhausted), somewhere right before the homily I devolved into inconsolable flood of tears that just would not end. I cried and cried and cried I kept crying until, and at some point, I had absolutely no idea what I was crying about anymore. An hour and a half later, I had cried enough to self-soothe, and with my very puffy face and a very large post-cry headache, I reached a point where maybe, just maybe I just could (even) with today.

Whenever I find myself in this state– tear-stained and puffy, with a lingering headache– I can’t help but think of everything involved in my fit of tears in terms of science.

It all starts when I think of emotion as a system. When I apply the laws of thermodynamics to systems– these laws, by the way, are very much about order and disorder– it all falls in place and all of the crying starts to make sense in a very abstract way. Why I gravitate towards science when I get a huge case of the feels, I will never know (actually, wait, yes I do!) but here is the way my thinking generally works:

• The first law of thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but it can be transferred/ transformed into one form from another.
• The second law of thermodynamics states that as energy is transferred from one form to another in a system, some energy is lost. (We usually refer to this as the law of entropy, and the energy is usually lost in the form of heat.)

When I apply this to emotions– remember, we’re considering emotions as a system here, nothing else– it works like this:

• The first law of emotions is that they cannot be created or destroyed, but they can be transferred or transformed into other emotions.
• The second law of emotions is that they can be transferred from one emotion to another, but in this process, some energy is lost.

For me, thus, it follows that when I get an overwhelmingly major case of the feels, particularly the negative ones, they can’t be destroyed, only transformed into something else. And because systems are always moving towards a state of equilibrium– stability may be a more fitting word to use here– it’s the job of that system, when I’m overwhelmed, to transfer my feelings into something else entirely. When there is too much disorder going on, whether that disorder is happy or sad, my system can transforms that energy into tears or butterflies in my stomach or some other physical reaction (entropy) or whatever else it takes to make the system self-stabilize. (As the energy– or whatever the damned feeling is that’s taken over and wreaked havoc on me– decreases, so too does the disorder, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing). Once enough of that energy is lost, things return back to normal. We may feel pain again or we may remember the pain we suffered in its original state, but it will never be as strong as it once was when its energy first entered our systems.

When I think about it, I don’t think that it’s an accident that we share tears or other similar reactions as a response to sadness or to trauma of any kind. I know that the crying doesn’t fix everything, that it isn’t a real answer to all of the sad and scary and frustrating and terrible things that happen in the world, but is an important step in transforming one kind of emotion into another.

I’ve often wondered why, when I’m upset, I find myself turning to scientific laws for consolation. When it comes to the processes behind my tears, though, when the actual feelings are ripping into me, it’s so very hard to have the faith that they will get better. Sometimes, especially after weeks like this past one, though, it’s a relief to think that systems, whatever they may be, are constantly moving towards a state of thermodynamic equilibrium, towards a place where things “get better” or become “optimal.”

I can tell myself all day long things will to get better, but it’s difficult to have faith and truly believe that in the face of fear and bad feelings. It’s better when science says so, because I cannot, cannot, cannot argue with science in the face of reason.

After yesterday’s bombing during the Boston Marathon, we have another date in April by which to mark a tragedy. April 15th is theirs. April 16th belongs to those who were killed at Virginia Tech. April 19th is for the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing and for Waco, TX. April 20th is for those who were killed at Columbine High.

This is not a very good week for us– a very not good week for us indeed.

Much of yesterday’s media coverage and social media discussion encouraged focusing on the good that prevailed in the face of the terror that has killed three and injured 165+ more. Look to the first responders who immediately ran towards the bombing to help those who had been hurt. Look to those who opened their homes to runners who were unable to make it home because their cars and hotels were inside of the evacuation zone. Look to those who, immediately after running a marathon, gave blood, offered their services as doctors and nurses and as concerned human beings to those who needed it most. Look to the good in the world, it has been said, and in this they are not wrong.

After six years of knowing the pain that comes with senseless tragedy, the only thing I know is that I know nothing at all. I have found in this time, though, that if you look for it, you can find hope and solace in the people around you. There are millions of people who you’ve never met who are thinking of you and who are praying for you, many of whom who want to help and will do so if they find a way. In time, the physical wounds (if you have any) will heal– and so too the other more indiscernible wounds will follow.

And if all else fails, a wonderful little band called Guster sings it best:

Hang on
Hang on

When all is shattered
When all your hope is gone
Who knows
How long
There is a twilight
A nighttime and a dawn

We break
We bend
With hand in hand
When hope is gone
Just hang on
Hang on

We’re going to have a little talk about Sunday, April 15, 2007… the calm before the storm that erupted six years ago when 32 students were murdered in cold blood on my college campus. We’re going to talk about it because it was the last day of my normal life– I didn’t know it then– and it is the last time I remember life without the anxiety, the heartbreak, the loss, the panic, the PTSD and everything else I’ve had to work so hard to overcome since that terrible, horrible, no good very bad day.

We’re going to talk about it because it was Reema’s birthday, and because Reema was a classmate in an Urban Affairs and Planning Course that I took during my junior year to fufill some Core Curriculum requirements towards graduation. We were in the same 10:10 class on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and she was one of the younger students in the French Language and Literature program at Virginia Tech. In addition to being a gorgeous young lady of Lebanese descent, she was smart, she was passionate about dance, and she was incredibly excited about spending her summer working in France.

There’s not very much that can be said about the day itself, except that it was cold and rainy, and that a friend of mine driving through town had stopped in for a late lunch at my favorite restaurant, the Cellar. That Sunday was the rain date for the International Street Festival held by that the Council for International Student Organizations that had taken place for some 22 years, an event that had to be called for rain and moved indoors because of unseasonable weather. Having had fond memories of every other International Street Fair weekend being sunny and beautiful, I was upset that the hours I had spent making Mousse au Chocolat and crepes with others for the French Club fundraiser may have been spent in vain. Despite the crappy weather (so cold! so windy!), though, turnout seemed to hold and the French Club and the rest of the participating organizations were packed into the Commonwealth Ballroom in Squires Center. I was late the event, as usual, but I made it just in time to Reema, my classmate, in the middle of a troupe of Lebanase dancers on stage in traditional costume, doing what she loved the most.

Just days later, I realized that Reema’s parents were there too when she was dancing on stage. They had driven four hours from Northern Virginia to see her dance and to celebrate her birthday that weekend. Through my friends, I found out that her parents were sure to let her know that they loved her very much and that they were very proud of her before driving back home.

They didn’t know it then– and I didn’t know it when I saw her, either– but that day, her birthday, was the last time that any of us would see her alive. The next morning, not even 18 hours later, she was murdered with eleven of her classmates on second floor of Norris Hall in Madame Couture-Nowak’s French class. In total, 30 people lost their lives that morning for no reason other than that they were in the right place– in class, as they should have been– at the wrong time.

After the deaths of so many of my classmates that day, I’ve never looked at an empty seat in a classroom the same way again.

When I think about what happened the next day, my heart breaks every time that my mind wanders to her parents and begins to imagine how they must have felt the next morning when they found out that their daughter had been murdered just hours after they had last seen her. They were so lucky to have had that last day together– so fortunate to have been able to say to their daughter on what was the last day of her life that they were so proud of her and they loved her very much– but so, so unfortunate to have had her taken away from them in such a horrible, horrible way.

On this day, the sixth anniversary of the last “normal” day of my life, I can’t help but think that we could have prevented the parents in every other shooting rampage that has taken place since of the unbearable cruelty and pain of outliving their children. In a convocation speech made just two days after our most horrible loss, poet Nikki DiGiovanni reminded us in her speech that “no one deserves a tragedy.”

We will prevail, she said, and we have. Never forget, she said, and we haven’t forgotten. No one deserves a tragedy, she said, and yet they still happen with frightening regularity.Why, people, why? Why aren’t we doing everything in our power to keep this from happening again?

I know it is coming, because I can feel it inching closer and closer with every fiber of my being.

“It,” in this case, is the anniversary of the worst day of my life. That day, April 16th, 2007, was a cold and windy Monday. In the early hours of the morning, a gunman shot a student and an RA in West Ambler Johnson. After a brisk walk downtown, where he stopped at the post office to mail a videotape to NBC, the perpetrator of the early morning shooting headed to Norris Hall. There, he chained the doors to the building and, around 9:47am, he began a shooting rampage that lasted for only a few minutes. After taking the lives of 32 students and faculty at my university, the gunman turned the gun on himself and took his own life.

I’ve thought the shooting every day since it happened, for 2, 188 days to be exact. I’ve had time to think about my classmates who died, about the girl I had known since we were five years old in Sunday School at the church down the street from my Grandaddy’s house, about the first responders who had to see the bloodshed and carnage firsthand. I’ve had 2,188 days to grasp what has happened.

The rest of the country, specifically those in charge of it, has had that long to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. And yet…

When I look at the state of things, I’m disgusted because I feel like our loss wasn’t big enough to change things, despite it being the biggest in US history. At times, it feels like the deaths of my classmates were in vain, that any good that could have come out of them never met its full potential, that the suffering and the pain that we’ve all endured weren’t big enough or important enough to ensure that it could never, ever happen again. On average, a mass shooting happens every four months in the United States. How many of those could have been avoided if people took the opportunity six years ago to make sure that something similar could never ever happen again, not just in an educational setting, but anywhere else in our country?

Sure, a commission was formed to answer the questions surrounding the shooting but the report they completed was riddled with factual errors. The $10 million spent in the aftermath of the shootings went to on-campus security measures to ensure that it could never happen there again… but that was for one campus, not all of them. Lots and lots of money was thrown around to cure the ills that were brought about by the shootings (not enough, though, because it was a six month wait to get an appointment with a therapist), but how did writing some laws and installing locks on doors help? Where were the widespread preventative efforts to make sure this didn’t, couldn’t happen again? What does it say about us that we let what happened in the parking lot of a Safeway in Tuscon, AZ., what happened in Aurora, CO, and what happened to those young, innocent children in Sandy Hook, CT come to pass, when surely other courses of action could have been pursued?

It has been six years, and another body of students will spend their lives fighting PTSD, anxiety, and all that comes with a school shooting. More parents, this time of younger, more impressionable little persons will grapple for answers and will search for answers that just don’t come. More communities have been and will be torn apart until something is done.

Ours was the biggest mass shooting in history, and for six Aprils I’ve feared the moment that I turn on the TV to find that another similar tragedy will have overtaken ours, that more people on a larger scale will so intimately know that through which we’ve worked so hard to prevail. We need more than partisan discourse and a few meager laws to change things, we need decisive actions that impart huge obstacles to those attempting to procure the weapons through which such terrible, horrible things can be done. We need to do everything in our power to make swift and strong decisions on gun control and on supporting mental healthcare. We need to do it now, before the other shoe drops and something worse that what we’ve already seen happens. Anything less would be dishonoring the lives of all that we’ve lost to these massacres, absolute folly for a society that is supposed to value life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I had a post titled, “In search of Mr. ‘Saurus” all queued up and ready to go, and it was going to be awesome. It was going to be poetry, y’all, absolute poetry and it was going to have a surprise ending all about how I’m no longer a singlesaurusrex and other tales. After all of the blogging about [him] and [boyfriend app] and [Mr. Pretentious] and the lack of blogging about the [dude] who broke my heart, after all of the [darling] appreciation life and other tales of loveless singledom going on around here, I was going to have something awesome to shout from my blog’s rooftop about how after so long, it had FINALLY happened and now we were going to flirt and whisper sweet nothings and OMG, I can kiss someone!!! and we could be a perfectly lovely couple together… until I realized that with this person, those things were never ever going to happen. And so here I am, realizing that I almost made the mistake of settling but I didn’t because ain’t nobody got time for that around here.

When I pulled the plug on the whole damned thing, I couldn’t help but think of what [darling] says to me when we discuss a date that didn’t go well or a relationship that didn’t quite work out. “On to the next one, ” he says, and even if I hit a few more bumps on the road before I get there… that’s exactly where I soon hope to be.

A few weeks ago (five, if anyone’s counting) I wrote a post about what I’d be giving up when observing Lent. It began like this,

I don’t do religion, really– and no, I’m not militant about my lack of faith, either– but one thing I’ve taken from it is the observance of Lent each year. This forty day period of self-denial, I’ve found, is a great way to build good habits or break bad ones. By definition, a habit is formed after 28 occurrences of a particular behavior, good or bad. The Lenten Period, therefore, is long enough for me to be habit forming, long enough to make a positive change to my life with just enough extra time built in to make sure that the new behavior sticks.

 

It wasn’t a post as much as it was a giant hissy fit that I threw on the internet, and I still can’t quite believe how much I hate the person I was when I wrote it. (Also, I can’t believe how many times I’ve found myself writing about myself during #52weeks– the madness! It has to end!) Thankfully, just a few days after writing the post, I snapped out of it and revisited the idea of Lent and with something more positive and meaningful in mind. In a post too full of private musings and fears to ever publish in its entirety, I wrote:

It all began to click inside of my head on Sunday morning, when I, forever in a liminal zone between belief and non-belief, found myself mesmerized by the sapphire rays of light streaming through the stained glass vitrines of Grace Cathedral. While the visiting dean from another diocese spoke on the things she had heard some people giving up for Lent– Facebook, and Diet Dr. Pepper– she also asked a very important question about whether we are doing enough to protect ourselves from temptation and whether we’re working hard enough against the little voices inside that are the tools of these negative forces, the voices that make us doubt ourselves and feel that we are not worthy of love, of good, of anything really.

I know this voice well– it is “the fear”– and it is at the base of every bad decision or serious mistake I’ve ever made, it is at the center of almost every heartbreak or self-fulfilling prophecy I’ve ever had come to being.

The real thing that needs to go isn’t [him] at all, it’s the fear, that damned thing that lurks beneath the hurt feelings and internet hissy fit like the one I threw last week. ”The fear” is that the little voice that tells me that I’m not worthy of love, that I’m never going to find it, that I’m not deserving of it, that I’m going to ruin everything if I do get it, and that I will end up forever alone, childless, and never happy.

 

In short, he wasn’t the problem– I was. A few paragraphs later, I came to the conclusion that it was rather vain and a tad ineffective to to banish [him] from my life for six weeks, so I would go for something much bigger and more serious instead. As it was a threat to my future and my happiness, I declared that I was redoing this whole Lent thing and giving up both him AND the fear itself.

Weeks later, I’m happy to report that I have had very much courage in the face of “the fear” and in a bit of unexpected sadness that has come my way. I’m also happy to report that I failed entirely in my quest to give [him] up, and that in an unexpected set of developments (tacos were involved), I may actually get to kiss him whenever I want to. Though Lent isn’t quite over yet, I find myself ecstatically anticipating the approaching finish line. I don’t know what lies ahead, and I’m not sure if it’s grace or luck or hope that has brought me here, but everything that was so wrong in my life a few months before is falling in place in front of my eyes.

Is this what poetry feels like? Is this actually my life? I don’t know how it happened, but for the first time ever… I’m just going to go with it. Anything else would be sheer madness.

I’ve been thinking alot about tacos lately, and I’ve come to the conclusion that my relationship with them is one of the most important food relationships I’ve ever had in my life.

I know, I know. It sounds crazy. I’ll explain.

If you know me at all, you know that when I get excited about something… I just don’t shut up about it. As I tend to get easily excited by all things food– chocolate! sparkling water! caffeine!– I have a tendency to take to the Twitters and go on a rant about it. Case in point, Tuesday:

How am I supposed to get anything done today when I know that things like lobster tacos exist in this world?!—
Jessy Irwin (@jessysaurusrex) March 19, 2013

@bmwgirlie08 I KNOW I WANT THEM NOW. #tacoappreciationlife—
Jessy Irwin (@jessysaurusrex) March 19, 2013

@jessysaurusrex I'm jealous of the relationship you and tacos have. I want that in my life.—
Emily Merritt (@EmilyMerritt) March 20, 2013

@KayTeeWhy @EmilyMerritt Wanna circle the lady-wagons and write about tacos? Specifically our relationship with them? #52weeks—
Jessy Irwin (@jessysaurusrex) March 20, 2013

@jessysaurusrex @kayteewhy Yes! Yes! A thousand times yes!—
Emily Merritt (@EmilyMerritt) March 20, 2013

Current status: This is the end of all taco-related tweets for the evening. South Park – J.Lo Songs bit.ly/11cxXg9 via @YouTube—
Jessy Irwin (@jessysaurusrex) March 20, 2013

I don’t know when our relationship started, but I know it happened when I was in young. Whenever my family (which, btw, is very unusually structured) had something to celebrate, whenever we wanted to spend time together, we usually did so in a Mexican restaurant. My Mom and I would fill up on chips and salsa, my little brother would dump habenero hot sauce all over everything he ate, I impatiently awaited the arrival of my tacos de carne asada, and the rest of the adults imbibed jumbo Texas-sized margaritas throughout the meal. The tradition extended into my college years– when I came home from college, we ate /ALL/ the tacos– and even became a tradition that embedded itself into my romantic relationships. We’re not going to even discuss what happened to my life in the years after I was introduced to Chipotle for the first time, though I will admit that I may have spent more time from 2006-2009 scheming road trips for tacos y burritos instead of, um, learning all the things.

Later, I moved to the land of taco trucks, taquerias and more Mexican food than I could have ever dreamed of (OMG, Chipotle everywhere!), but me and my East Coast taste felt intimidated by all of the new things happening here, and when it came to tacos, nothing was really right anymore. Tacos had always been there– for love, for happiness, for togetherness, for celebration– until I packed up my life and moved away from everything I had ever known.

In hindsight, I should have recognized my adhedonia it as a symptom of something larger: nothing in my life was right at that time, either, and I was trapped in a year-long bout of something infinitely more miserable that sucks all of the joy from your life. One day, it got so bad that I impulse-purchased a flight home because I felt that I might fall to pieces at any moment. A few days later, I found myself on a plane flying 3,000 miles across the country because, for the first time in my adult life, I needed to see my Mommy. I can’t think of any other time in my life that we’ve ever been so happy to see one another.

For the rest of my life, I’ll always remember the devilish look on her face when she picked me up from the airport and asked if I was hungry yet. When she asked if I had any ideas for dinner, her big blue eyes flashed, her grin approached Cheshire cat size, and she brought out that voice that we only use with one another.

“Mexican?”

I said not a word, but shrugged and flashed a devilish grin of my own. After a quick trip to her house and a change of clothes, I found myself in the middle of karaoke night at one of our favorite Mexican restaurants. (FYI: I didn’t sing, but my mom sure as hell gave Beyonce a run for her money. God, I come from great genes.) Later that night, full of tacos and alcohol, I laid in my childhood bed thinking about the life I had lived since the last time I had slept there. I knew that things couldn’t continue as they were, and that when I returned to San Francisco a few days later that I would very literally be fighting for my life.

(I had known that before I left, really–  and [darling], always the perceptive one, did too.)

For the ten days between my return home and Christmas, I was alone and I set to work laying the foundation to rebuild my own happiness. It happened very slowly at first, and then all at once after the biggest problem in my life excised itself entirely. Everything old became new and exciting again, and as the work continued, I began to feel like myself for the first time in I don’t know how long. I knew I was getting somewhere when I went on a two week all tacos, all the time binge… and then drove my roommate nuts for another fortnight with my constant answer of, “OMG! WANT TACOS, NOW!” whenever she asked what I was thinking about for the meal in question.

Tacos– which, by the way, are pretty much the most perfect food ever– are the most important key indicator on my internal happiness index, and the more in demand they are, the better the quality of my happiness. If you’re looking for a way to my heart, a way to inspire essite (excitement), a way to celebrate something good or to come up with an excuse to hang out with me, tacos are the place to start. In fact, if you’re a handsome, intelligent and single male reading this blog, you’re 100000000000% more likely to land a date for me if you suggest  (surprise!) we go somewhere for tacos.

And if you ever, ever hear of me refusing or avoiding tacos– please, for the love of all things tacos, do ask if everything’s alright.

Why is it that the students with the greatest need are consistently put in the position of not getting the support and resources they deserve?

Everyone responsible for this sequester business should be ashamed of themselves.

The students who will lose out will be the ones we should be most careful to protect: children from poor families and special needs kids.

Federal funding for education will be slashed by 5.1 percent, until Congress can agree on a new budget. Though the federal government only makes up about 10 percent of the total education spending, this share is significant in every town budget. Schools need Washington’s money to provide basic services for its students, as states and localities have faced their own budget crises in recent years.

To understand the severe unfairness of these cuts, lets start with a brief primer on federal education funding. The majority of federal funding for education is targeted for two groups of school kids — the poor and the disabled. Title 1 federal support for low-income school districts and Head Start the pre-school program for disadvantaged children serve the disadvantaged kids. The Department of Education support for special education amounts to between a sixth and a quarter of education spending in any given year.

via The Worst Victims of the Education Sequester: Special-Needs Students and Poor Kids – Laura McKenna – The Atlantic.

Last year, I began work on perhaps one of the biggest projects that I will have ever undertaken. It hasn’t been a Kickstarter project or a stealth startup, rather, it has been something infinitely close, personal, and vital for my future– the architecture of my own happiness.

The past few months of my life have been one of the most vibrant periods of personal growth I’ve ever had, and it all came about when I realized one thing: that the only thing I could change about the world is myself. (The world wasn’t going to change, surely, and approaching it in the same way and expecting different results… we call that insanity, yes?) When I needed inspiration, I sought out beauty; when I needed a solid foundation, I found myself (a non-believer) spending my Sunday mornings in a cathedral studying the tenets upon which so many others have laid the groundwork of their lives.

We do not become who we want to be in huge bounds– we find ourselves, rather, in a collection of small steps comprised of the decisions we make each day of our lives. While I’ve never been good at believing in myself or envisioning the finished results of a work in progress, for the first time in my life, I have an inexplicable faith that everything I’m working so hard to have will all come together.

A few months ago, I wrote a little about the absolute heartbreak that I felt when the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary school happened. As a someone who has experienced firsthand this sort of shooting, I couldn’t help but think, “OF COURSE,” when I ran across this article, “Newtown Children Remain Scared As School Tries To Move On From Sandy Hook Shooting.” While I’m rarely ever a fan of the Huffington Post, the writer of this article did her due diligence and was incredibly thorough in her research and description of some of the lasting effects that such a tragic, traumatic event can have on its survivors. I wasn’t in a classroom when it happened and I didn’t experience or hear gunshots ring out whatsoever, but I still get nervous when I hear a balloon pop, loud noises sometimes tear my nerves to bits, and I always keep an eye on the exits when I go to movie theaters (which I usually avoid) or lectures.

I was 21 years old when a mass shooting unfolded in my world, and it has been almost six years since the anniversary of the shooting that tore my university to pieces and took the lives of thirty two people with it. I cannot explain my own healing process any better than saying that time (eventually) heals all wounds, though it is a treatment that in these cases is required in mass quantities. When I think about elementary school students suffering from the same symptoms and anxiety that I did, though, my heart absolutely breaks for them, for their teachers, for the parents, and for their community all over again. If ever you need a reminder of why we should do everything in our power to prevent mass tragedies of this kind, I suggest reading the article and thinking of the lives that will never, ever be the same again after that horrific day in December.

“Survivors of such shootings can experience nightmares, flashbacks, hyper-vigilance in which they are constantly on the lookout for danger and startled responses, said Russell Jones, a psychology professor at Virginia Tech who counseled survivors of a mass shooting at his school. Between 8 to 15 percent of those who experience traumas such as mass shootings develop PTSD, but about half of them no longer have the symptoms after three months, he said.Sounds and smells associated with mass shootings can bring back memories of the horror, said Carolyn Mears, author of the book “Reclaiming School in the Aftermath of Trauma.”

via Newtown Children Remain Scared As School Tries To Move On From Sandy Hook Shooting.

via On Sandy Hook, a few months later– “Newton Children Remain Scared As School Tries to Move On From Sandy Hook Shooting”.

It’s been a few hours since something last gave me a ragestroke on the internet, so I thought I’d come back and have a little rant. I stumbled across this article from the New York times on apps for breakups, and couldn’t quite believe what I was reading as it all unfolded.

On the “problem” that the founders were trying to solve when they created their app, Killswitch:

“The two women, both of Manhattan, came up with the idea after seeing a friend go through breakup after breakup online. ‘The poor girl, her Facebook profile was a minefield of elements of her defunct relationship’ Ms. de Soto said. ‘We couldn’t believe there wasn’t a mechanism on Facebook or social media that answered that.”

I have only one thing to say , and it’s this: OH HELL NO.

Ladies, I’m calling call bullshit on the “Oh, poor girl,” treatment of your friend, who you just couldn’t believe didn’t have some sort of app to cover up her inability to censor herself when it came to sharing her relationship all up on the Facebook. While it was sweet of you to build an app to make up for her to be able to erase the proof that she couldn’t stop herself from oversharing the boyfriend of the week/month/year all over the social medias– bless your hearts!– maybe you and your friends should have invested that time in something a little more constructive, perhaps by exploring ways in which you won’t be tempted to repeat the same behavior and expect different results in the future. What is it about social media that makes you unable to exercise the sort of restraint that prevents you from ever having to deal with the post-breakup minefield, anyway?

It’s not technology’s fault that you can’t readily remove content on a whim– it’s yours for putting it there in the first place.

Apps and Web Sites That Go With a Breakup – NYTimes.com.

via Apps and Web Sites That Go With a Breakup – NYTimes.com.

Is it me, or does this absolutely reek of the silver-bullet fallacy? Yes, yes, I know that those words appear in the first sentence, but having come from a low-income background… I’m not buying it.

Technology isn’t going to make up for the lost opportunities and inequities that low-income and predominately minorities face, no matter how well-implemented a particular program is. An iPhone, iPad or any other device isn’t the answer, y’all, and it’s sure as hell not the answer to racism– and you’ve read about that whole correllation/causation thing, yes? You can’t just say that the digital divide has been closed because you hand a kid a device and VOILA, the kid can access the web and all is righting itself in the world.  The device doesn’t fix the effects of being a child in a single-parent family, it doesn’t make up for not having enough food to go on the table, it doesn’t suddenly fufill Maslow’s heirarchy of needs because the kid is participating in school. It takes people– teachers, community leaders, administrators, parents– to help right the wrongs that are constantly perpetuated in our schools and in our society, and the voices we need to listen to the most are not always heard because they’re not predominately white, affluent or suburban.

Oh, and while I’m at it, can we get some info on the research methodology? Qualcomm and Cisco– when they did their research, was it conducted by a third party or did they do it all by themselves? You know, because data and research can’t at all be co-opted to tell anything but the truth or anything. Numbers don’t lie or anything.

via For Low-Income Kids, Access to Devices Could Be the Equalizer | MindShift.

The eighth day of this month marked the end of my second year living here, and the beginning of my third. I’m not sure what the rules are about these things, but I’m pretty sure that it’s safe to say that San Francisco and I are definitely a thing.

When I moved here, I do so with a heart very much broken by tragedy, a shooting that upended my life and took away the lives of thirty two others. Some days, I thought that I’d never recover from it all, but this place– this beautiful, maddening place with its frustrating weather and its brilliant people focused on making the world better for all, this infinite city full of breathtaking views and boundless energy– this place and the life I have built here with very dear friends, a roommate who has literally cut people for me (this is a mutual thing, y’all), and my most dearest [darling], this place healed me, this place brought me to life and brought me to a life that I could have never, ever imagined for myself or thought possible. Here I have loved more fiercely and passionately than I ever knew possible; I’ve overcome so very many obstacles that before felt insurmountable, I’ve survived heartbreak and loss at any other point in my life would have shattered me to bits. I’ve moved mountains and worked harder than I could have ever imagined to be able to make the world a better place. This place has transformed me into a person, into a woman I’m very proud to be and for that alone I cannot thank it enough.

I wish I had something more fitting to say about my adventures with this dear city, but I do not. For the twenty five years and change preceding the day that I got off that fateful Southwest flight, I had felt as if I had been waiting for my life to begin. When I came here, when I chose the Bay Area and San Francisco as my home, my life began.

I think, perhaps, that there’s a song that says it best– “I belong with you, you belong with me. You’re my sweetheart.”

[This post is one of many that have been relegated to my drafts folder for no apparent reason. Originally written by hand in my Moleskine journal, it never quite made it to publication during my two week experiment in tablet computing.]

Every time that I’ve sat down to write this week, I’ve ended up writinng about two very important things going on in my life right now: dating and tacos. In a bid to stop the madness, I’m literally writing this week’s post.

(If we’ve never quite met this way before, hi, I’m Jessy and this is how I write, Handwritten script is one of my very most favorite things in the world and despite my love for technology and digital media, I will defend the need for handwriting to be taught to everyone until my very very last breath.)

Not very long ago, my most favorite of social networks released a little iOS app called Vine. If you’ve yet to encounter it in the wild, Vine is an app that stitches together six seconds of video footage into something rather similar to an animated GIF with sound. A product of my most beloved of all things on the internet, I downloaded it immediately. As the rest of the internet went rather mad over it, I couldn’t help but find myself a little clueless.

I’m boring, you see. I’m an art historian at heart, y’all, and if an image moves, I’m not quite sure what to do with it or how exactly to navigate my way through it. My visual vocabulary is very much based on static, fixed images and I’ve never been able to reconcile my comfort with still images with that whole motion thing that has been happening since, uh, video art became a thing. This is probably why that YouTube thing is lost on me, and why I’m not usually a huge movie fan and why my browser(s) together have never had to do much work in the arena of video display. Did I mention that I really, really don’t “get” video?

Okay, back to Vine. Or, well… not really.

I’ve been on a bit of a technology/blog hiatus as of late– did you know that if you leave the internet, everything is pretty much in the same place that you left it when you come back?!– because I’m still in mourning over the passing of Rexie, my pre-unibody Macbook Pro. I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the process of content creation and content consumption that takes on the web. At times, I admit, I feel like I don’t even “go here” despite having rather uninterrupted access to the web since the age of about twelve years old. How, exactly, am I supposed to create content in a medium with which I do not always feel confident? How do I create without really feeling I understand what is going on with every “OMG can’t live without it!!!!1!” thing that comes out on the web.

I should probably mention that I think too much, at times, and that sometimes I make things a bit harder than they should be. This is a six second video app we’re talking about, not a film being submitted to the Sundance Film Festival, and yet I’m dropping a bajillion words on WordPress while stressing about it.

Yup, you guessed it: I’m going to go all web literacy on this business in 3…2…1…

I speak about it more than I had ever really expected I suppose, but that is really because I find that as a society, we need it more than ever. Perhaps daydreaming about a little app that creates six second of OMG PICTURES THAT MOVE isn’t the most opportune occasion to start, but more people than ever in our history have access to the web, and that number is growing exponentially in smaller and smaller windows of time. More people than ever are creating content for the web, and more content than ever has made content discovery a problem that much of the Valley and the world is attempting to solve with search and algorithm. But the real problem here isn’t that there is more out there than ever, rather that we are not as a society armed with a suite of critical thinking skills specialized or honed enough to help us navigate this other multimedia place– a simulacrum of the society in which we live built in endless programming languages and has been optimized in seemingly every way possible– that has so quickly become so important to use that some have begun to consider access to it a fundamental human right.

(Slow down, guys– it’s 2013 and there are still people in this world without running water, sanitation, or many of the components of the heirarchy of needs. Access to the internet is important, and the digital divide is nothing to sneeze at– but #firstworldproblem much?!)

I’ve long been a proponent of teaching visual literacy as critical thinking, though with the endless other crises on education’s table, well… we’re not exactly going to see every high school student be legally mandated to take an art or history of design course, are we? We’re awfully busy these days navigating both a virtual and an actual society– much of that virtual society, by the way, is increasingly visual (Pinterest, Instagram and the ubiquity of cameraphones I’m looking at you here!) and we have fewer tools than ever to unpack the endless imagery in front of our own eyes. What happens  then, when we’re inundated with more multimedia content  video  audio, moving image, whatever that has been designed and optimized to capture and hold our rapt attention for as long as possible?

Where are we going with this thing we call the web? And how did we find ourselves here? Sure, my six seconds of a late Saturday afternoon cocktail aren’t the end of the world as we know it, but it only took a day for the first “How to Use Vine in Marketing” webinar to pop up and after dealing with thousands of web and media illiterate college students who are unable to spot simple things like bias, I can’t help but be a bit worried. Where do we start drawing lines and really discussing what we’re up against when it comes to all of our webs, the inter- and outer- ones? Surely we’ve been building them long enough to take a step back and to do a little preventative untangling for this rather large series of tubes we’ve interwoven for decades now, but who is going to start?

I’m a Codecademy dropout.

If ever there were a year for me to learn how to code, last year was it. Every month, new startups aiming to teach the uninitiated how to code launched across the Internets. Each week, I got a polite email from Codecademy reminding me about the Code Year challenge that I took to learn coding during 2012. (I feel really, really bad for whoever had to monitor the open rates for that weekly email: ouch!) All of the MOOCs– Udacity, Coursera, MIT– offered some sort of intro to computer science or coding course at launch last year, and yet I completed nothing. In late July, I even found myself in the middle of pretty much every security engineer ever at a hacker convention in Las Vegas, surrounded by people behind some serious web shenanigans and fight for the future of the Internet as we know it. The enthusiasm and creativity– yes, y’all, engineers and hackers ARE creative– made its way back to the Silicon Valley with me, and I even made a pact with [dude] (he’s no more) that I’d work on Codecademy every day until I finished my Code Year challenge.

And yet… I still can’t don’t code.

Across the board, MOOCs, open courseware and open education resources suffer from low completion and adoption rates. Sure, some of the failures of MOOCs and free curriculum resources have to do with continuity and instructional design– What do you do after you’ve taken CS 101, and there’s no follow up curse? What happens when your MOOC falls apart?- but I’m sure as hell not going to jump on the bandwagon of haters, most of whom condemn the site entirely for its pedagogy, as if pedagogy were the only determinate element of education responsible for learning. (Hint: pedagogy isn’t everything.) Attrition rates in free educational opportunities aren’t a pedagogy problem, a marketing problem, or a community problem — they’re a passion problem.

When it comes to coding, I don’t have the passion and the dedication it would take to learn something that has at times frustrated me so very much. (Seriously, have you SEEN the things you have to do with punctuation marks to make code work?!) What am I going to do about my coding problem, then? Absolutely nothing.

I’ll just go find and learn something else to take its place. Or as [darling] would say, “On to the next one.”

Having spent the better part of the last year in a lonely holding pattern, this is probably one of the most powerful, beautiful and inspiring definitions of love– and one of the best scientific explorations of the emotion and its biological implications– that I’ve ever come across.

Love is a ” ‘micro-moment of positivity resonance,’ essentially any small interaction in which we genuinely connect with another human.

via How You Can Fall In Love Every Day, According To Science | Co.Design: business + innovation + design.

I don’t do religion, really– and no, I’m not militant about my lack of faith, either– but one thing I’ve taken from it is the observance of Lent each year. This forty day period of self-denial, I’ve found, is a great way to build good habits or break bad ones. By definition, a habit is formed after 28 occurrences of a particular behavior, good or bad. The Lenten Period, therefore, is long enough for me to be habit forming, long enough to make a positive change to my life with just enough extra time built in to make sure that the new behavior sticks. In a rather binding iMessage exchange with [darling], which really is where all important things between the two of us seem to happen, I made it officially official.

What I’m giving up for Lent this year is [him.] Here’s the binding, er, screenshot, as proof. Yes, the black splotch in this particular instance is a mention of [him], and no, the irony is not lost on me.

To be honest, there isn’t very much to be given up– things did not progress far, or at all really, despite months of flirtation– though I do hope to regain quite a bit of my mental processing power. For the next forty days, for six weeks, I will not think about his his smile or his eyes, and I will not spend another moment questioning the proper name for the color of his eyes in varying degrees of light. I will not permit myself to think about kissing him on every corner of this city in broad daylight or midnight. I won’t think about passing a rainy day together reading in a cafe. I won’t think about holding hands (I suck at that, really), about stolen kisses, amorous glances, late night cocktails or a whole host of other things that I could never begin to mention here. Most importantly, really, I won’t waste anymore energy contemplating what went wrong, what could have been, what I would do differently were the opportunity to arrive again. I won’t give the sinking feeling of rejection that has for weeks resided in the pit of my stomach anymore time or anymore attention.

For forty days and forty nights, he is banished from my being. I’m going to be tested beyond all measure, I’m sure, because there is no greater way to incite a want for something than to deny yourself of it. I’m going to give up torturing myself with thoughts of what felt like the biggest moment of fail of my adult life. I’m going to reread Alain de Boton’s philosophies on desire, lack of desire, and rejection until the wisdom they contain sticks. With any luck, it will be just enough time for me to forget that he made me think of building things with another person that I haven’t had or wanted for a very long time. With a bit of hard work, I will be new by Spring.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that my dearly beloved (we are gathered here today to mourn the passing of…) Rexie, the Macbook Pro that has been my constant companion since 2008, passed away during an ill-advised attempt to upgrade her OS. To say that I feel as if I’ve been in hell until today feels like hyberbole and massive understatement at the same time.

For the better part of the past year and a half, I’ve read endless advocacy of mobile computing. Tablets and phones are the future, says Our Lady of Silicon Valley (h/t to Dan Meyer for that jab), and desktop computing is SO over. As almost everything I do behind a machine is web-based, cloud-based, or has its own app, I thought perhaps that I’d be able to transition into a tablet-only existence sans issue. I could do almost everything that I needed to do from my iPad, right?

WRONG. Here are a few of the limitations I discovered while trying to live a tablet/mobile existence over the past couple of weeks:

• Most of the web isn’t optimized for mobile devices. This means that many, many sites render incorrectly or are inaccessible due to relying on technology that isn’t supported on tablet devices. A great example of this: restaurant websites, which very frequently run on Adobe Flash. It’s unbelievably frustrating to find what appears to be a great restaurant on Yelp while out and about during the weekend, only to find that its site inaccessible by phone or tablet because neither support Adobe Flash. Alternately, much of the web looks hideous when viewed through the Retina display of my iPad.
• Not all mobile-optimization is created equal. While many sites can auto-detect the browser you’re using to access them and direct you to a mobile-optimized version of a site, bugs are prolific. Buttons that don’t work, text boxes render incorrectly, and some of the best features of a tool or product are omitted entirely from the mobile browsing experience. When doing my taxes just the other day, I tried accessing an important student loan document via iPad, only to find that the PDF generated by the site couldn’t display the information I needed in Safari or Chrome. (Naturally, it opened like a charm on a non-mobile browser.)
• There aren’t enough truly great apps– and the constant push for apps adoption of web-based services sucks for everyone. Though I’ve changed the settings in both Safari and Chrome to block pop-up notifications, there’s no way to block the “Download our app!” banners and boxes that pop up every. single. time. I visit certain sites. Sometimes, though, I just want to access a site during a casual perusing of the internet, or better yet, I want to visit on my own terms so that I can drop it into iMessage, email it, bookmark it, save it to Pocket, send it to Instapaper, share it on Twitter or god knows what else. Sure, there are more APIs (application programming interfaces) than ever connecting apps and tools to one another, but some platforms are getting more defensive of their APIs and the tools I love the most usually don’t talk to one another in this way. What is the point of downloading yet-another-app that may not have the same functionality as the full-web version or limited-mobile version of a product?
• … Don’t even get me started on whether mobile devices encourage content consumption over content creation. Wondering why I haven’t been very productive as of late? It has been im-freaking-possible for me to respond to a long email on an iPad or an iPhone, much less write a blog during the mobile experiment. Sure, I could access social media– but contributing to a chat? holding a conversation? Forget it. While I did adopt a new little video app recently released by Twitter, and Instagram /all/ the things as usual– I’m not convinced that smaller screens and touchscreen keyboards are powerful or useful enough to contribute to the writing part of contributing to the read-write web.

As I’m never one to back away from a challenge, I thought that I’d take the passing of my Macbook as an opportunity to make lemons out of lemonade and experience something new. What did I discover? That tablets and mobile devices really aren’t good for anything but light tasks, and that it’s next to impossible to get anything worthwhile done on a tablet. But what do I know?

Desktop computing is dead, long live desktop computing.

Some weeks this year we will write about, after all, and some weeks this year will write us. My days, here are five of them– a week(ish) in the life of a Jessysaurusrex, if you will, though this one was anything but ordinary.

Monday, Rexie, my late 2007 pre-Unibody MacBook Pro, died. She has been the Apple of my eye and the longest lasting love of my life for almost six years and she will be sorely, sorely missed. I do not remember anything else about that day except for the deep sense of loss that overtook me, though much of my week has been punctuated with rants about the limitations of tablet computing, the limited features of mobile apps, sandboxing, and other annoyances that lead me to believe anything but the talking heads in the Valley who say that notebook computing is dead.

Tuesday was tacos– and the first time that I have ever seen a high-speed police chase up close and personal. On my way home from a late dinner with another love of my life (you know how I mean that, [dear], don’t even), I noticed quite a few flashing lights in my rear-view mirror. As I pulled over to allow the vehicles to pass, a black SUV sped around me, police cars swarmed like locusts, and then, I heard gunshots. I drove home and decided to stop for a drink to calm my nerves and celebrate my lack of panic. After a drink, a bit of flirting, a change of venue and my first-ever Negroni… the night ended in just as lovely of a manner as it had begun, and I forgot the car-chase drama entirely. It may have had something to do with finalizing Thursday night’s plans– or rather, with those plans being described as a date.

Wednesday… ugh, I was almost mugged. After meeting up and snarking with a new friend and fellow community manager, I hopped MUNI to return home around 8pm. On my way up the hill to my house, and through a very crowded area, I noticed that I was being followed. I ducked into a store to shop for a few minutes, but was followed after I left. A tall man– we’ll leave the full description out of this– began acting in a cagey and aggressive manner, watching me, speeding up and slowing down to keep pace with me. When I tried crossing the street, he tried following me. When I tried getting distance from him, he kept trying to get closer to me. Panicked, I stopped and read the signage on the front of my old art gallery, watching him watch me in the reflection of the glass. My first instinct was to turn around and go the opposite way: when I turned to do just that, he lunged towards me as if he were going to grab me, though a group of three girls passed between us and prevented that very thing from happening. I shook like a leaf when I ducked into the closest hotel and waited for my roommate to come and get me. I fought all night to keep the what-if thoughts out of my mind– was he going to hurt me? shoot me? stab me? rape me? — I cursed myself for not carrying pepper spray and didn’t stop shaking until the next morning. Did I mention that my roommate came to get me? She brought a knife, too, just in case we needed protection and/or to cut someone.

Thursday– there are no words for you, because you were divine. I ran home from an EdSurge event to slip into a dress, and three quarters of an hour later, he was there waiting outside of my building. After a quiet, lovely dinner with friends, we went for a walk. The walk led to a late drink, and after the drink we found ourselves in a sleeping city with light, misty rain. I still find myself getting lost in very small details– his eyes, his smile– but I will stop here because a lady never tells, though when asked, the look on her face might.

Friday. The morning involved coffee, the faint dinging of the cable cars in the distance, congratulating a friend on her impending freedom, and a quiet few minutes of smirking in Huntington Park. Friday afternoon involved my hair having a mind of its own and life goals that did not match with my own, then a long lunch, errands, and the acquisition of pepper spray. Friday evening involved meeting another much-adored friend in the Castro– we somehow arranged an impromptu tofu tasting– and I enjoyed his company and advice very, very much.

It has taken years of internal conflict for me to get here, to reach this place where I have rejected being alone or lonely and learned how to let go and to let life happen. San Francisco has never felt as beautiful or infinite as it did on Thursday night, and the spoils of seemingly endless war have never felt richer.

Of all of the crowdfunding sites, Kickstarter is the leader of the pack– it’s the biggest, most visible, most successful platform out there, and it because of it, a plethora of incredible projects have come to life. In 2012 alone, over two million people successfully funded 18,109 projects. For many, Kickstarter is to crowdfunding what Kleenex is to “tissue,” though there are many other platforms that have popped up to support the crowdfunding model.

Over the past few months, I’ve contributed time, money, and insight to two specific Kickstarter projects, both of which were funded with only hours to spare. The first, an interactive comic book app, the brainchild of John Boyer and Katie Pritchard, was built for the Plaid Avenger’s unforgettable World Regions class (and the community built around it) at Virginia Tech. The second project of which I was part was Outthink Inc’s “Tornado Maker,” an educational app that, upon completion, would be the only app in the entire Apple App Store designed for preteens.

Launching a Kickstarter campaign is relatively simple: after putting together a project, a creator picks the category in which the project best fits, and submits the project for vetting. Though there are some limitations to projects– namely, project renderings showing features that don’t yet exist are forbidden– Kickstarter has included a “Risks and Challenges” section in each project, and it encourages creators to carefully explore categories and the successful campaigns within them to decide “best fit” for their project. For Professor Boyer’s campaign, the “Comic” category was the one that made the most sense– though the format would be digital and interactive, the aim of the project was still to create a comic. For Outthink Inc’s “Tornado Maker,” another interactive educational app based on the principles of gamification and generative instruction, the “Game” category made the most sense. While both projects are educational to the very core, however, neither project appears in the results yielded from a search of the term “education.”

The search results also omit other well known, successful, education-based projects: Math 52 from Mathalicious, Code Hero from Primer Labs , SparkLAB, a fabrication lab on wheels from a group of Stanford d.school students, Mindblown Life from MindBlown Labs, and innumerable Maker projects that are part of the Maker Movement that has gained considerable momentum over the past year.

These campaigns and countless unsuccessful others have education at their very core, and yet they’re undiscoverable when searching for that very term. Given the success of education-specific sites like DonorsChoose, AdoptaClassroom, and TeacherLists, I can’t imagine a lack of demand for an education project category, especially with the entrepreneurial– teacherpreneurial, even– spirit among innovative educators. A quick comparison of seven different crowdfunding sites showed that five other sites, including Kickstarter competitor Indiegogo, feature an education vertical. Where is your education vertical, Kickstarter? And why is the user experience in searching for education projects so abysmal?

It’s been a big week for that little project I kicked off with some Twitter friends.

No, we’re not internet famous– yet?– but our ranks have doubled since we declared our intentions to write /ALL/ the things once a week for the next year. I’m jumping up and down in my seat with excitement essite as I type this, because I’m very much thrilled to introduce you to the three newest members of our #52weeks community, Emily, McKenzie, and Kristian.

Yesterday, Emily contributed with her first post, and I connected with it almost instantly. Her words embrace the concept of the growth mindset, the idea that our abilities are not tied to natural talent but on hard work.

“ This coming year is about breaking that mold and taking some risks. I’m ready to focus on the things I want to accomplish that I’m not sure about. The things that don’t come naturally, that might frustrate me, things that I may initially believe I’m not good at. Because real rewards come with real risks.”

This morning, I was completely bowled over when Kristian (KayTeaWhy) threw her introductory post into the ring. I’ve never met her before, but I connected immediately with her feelings about confidence and connecting with others.

I know that I have a voice, and thoughts and opinions, and a life, just like the rest of you.  I’ve just never been so confident to share all of that.  I’ve always longed for a connection with people, but it’s always been a game I’ve lost. And I really don’t like losing.

I’ll be updating this post to include Kristin’s first post when it appears.  In the mean time, here’s a link to Dan’s first and second posts, and to Phil’s first post in which he describes a new life journey. Want to join our adventure? Tweet any of us. We’d be honored to have you.