anonymous cowgirl

a take away show from Nikolas Konstantin on Vimeo.

What if, instead of Grand Theft Auto being about stealing cars and whatnot, it had been designed as a game about driving an ambulance? And you have to get the sick person to the hospital as quickly as you can without causing more accidents? Wouldn’t that be a better use of human capacity?

What other games could we alter?

If you’re looking for awesome games, Lev and I recently came across a board game called Pandemic , which is VERY challenging! It requires a good bit of consultation and teamwork with the other players to try to attain the goal (which is to stop the spread of disease across the world/board). I highly recommend.

Lev is busy taking an exam in his fancy math class, right now. Please think happy thoughts for him!

Yesterday I proctored an exam in a classroom full of undergraduates. Proctoring an exam makes you, for a while, almost superhuman in your highly attuned perception of hand movements. You stare out at a sea of people, writing, thinking, chewing on pencils, trying not to act suspicious. They shift, rub their faces, run their hands through their hair. Lean head against hand. Every movement of the fingers could be the beginning of a signal to you, the TA, that there’s a question to be resolved. Up a hand goes and you’re off, squeezing in between the aisles, hoping that you’ll understand the question and can help them.

Hope you all have a great Earth Day!

Between Two Worlds by Roxana Saberi

Roxana Saberi talks about the Baha’is in Iran’s notorious Evin prison on NPR Weekend Edition. Ms Saberi’s interview is remarkable. As an American-born Baha’i, I have certainly asked myself whether I would be strong enough to persevere amidst the religious persecution faced by our dear co-religionists in Iran. Ms Saberi confronted a similar situation during her time in Evin prison, and speaks frankly about the challenges, the pressure to make false confessions, and the strength she saw in her cellmates – Mrs Fariba Kamalabadi and Mrs Mahvash Sabet.

Her description of Mrs Kamalabadi and Mrs Sabet echoes this passage from a reknowned history of the Baha’i Faith:

Despite the shame and cruelties they were made to suffer, not one of these captives was known either to recant or to utter one angry word against his persecutors. Not even a whisper of discontent escaped their lips, nor did their countenances betray a shadow of regret or grief. No amount of adversity could succeed in darkening the light that shone in those faces; no words, however insulting, could disturb the serenity of their expressions. The Dawn-Breakers: Nabil’s Narrative of the Early Days of the Baha’i Revelation, p577

Having just come back from Texas, where I had the opportunity to have a few “interesting” conversations, I gotta hand it to Eric Knowles, Brian Lowery, and R.L. Schaumberg, for their brand new article in the March edition of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, “Racial prejudice predicts opposition to Obama and his health care reform plan.” Here’s the abstract:
“The present study examines the relationship between racial prejudice and reactions to President Barack Obama and his policies. Before the 2008 election, participants’ levels of implicit and explicit anti-Black prejudice were measured. Over the following days and months, voting behavior, attitudes toward Obama, and attitudes toward Obama’s health care reform plan were assessed. Controlling for explicit prejudice, implicit prejudice predicted a reluctance to vote for Obama, opposition to his health care reform plan, and endorsement of specific concerns about the plan. In an experiment, the association between implicit prejudice and opposition to health care reform replicated when the plan was attributed to Obama, but not to Bill Clinton – suggesting that individuals high in anti-Black prejudice tended to oppose Obama at least in part because they dislike him as a Black person. In sum, our data support the notion that racial prejudice is one factor driving opposition to Obama and his policies.” (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Took one of the youth to Greenacre Baha’i school on Friday. We had a brilliant time, visited with old friends, and definitely discovered some gems on the used books table, including “When We Grow Up,” by Bahiyyih Nakjhavani. The following paragraph, from the introduction of that book, suggests an understanding of childhood that recalls the poetry of A.A. Milne.

We have all been children. Maybe not all of us have been or will be parents, but we have all had the experience of being a child. No matter what race, what class, what culture we come from, we have all felt that peculiar smallness. We have watched the grown-ups come and go. We have tried to measure the meaning of our lives against their erratic and often contradictory motions.

An Early History of the Baha’i Faith, by William Sears

Kudos to Lev, my beloved husband and co-blogger, for such a dedicated streak of Fast-blogging! These last few days have been tumultuous, but so wonderful nevertheless. I thought I’d share a couple of things that fed my spirit this year.

This Fast, I’ve been trying to start each day by reading one chapter from William Sears’ book, Release the Sun, which is an account of the early days of the Baha’i Faith and those heroes we call the dawnbreakers. The valour and devotion of those souls is inspiring. One quote from Tahirih (Chapter 15) particularly captured my attention. She had been listening to another one of the early believers eloquently expounding upon the signs and proofs of the Faith, and she spoke up, saying, “Let deeds, not words, testify to thy faith, if thou art a man of true learning. Cease idly repeating the traditions of the past, for the day of service, of steadfast action, is come. Now is the time to promote the Word of God, and to sacrifice ourselves in His path. Let deeds, not words, be our adorning.”

She did, of course, live her own life in accordance with this call to action. She boldly broke with the dominant religious tradition and invoked the wrath of many by proclaiming the equality of women and men, a core Baha’i principle, and as the first women’s suffrage martyr, she paid with her life for it. Her last words before she was strangled were “You can kill me as soon as you like, but you cannot stop the emancipation of women.”

Nineteen chapters in the book, nineteen days of the Fast. It works out quite nicely.

Speaking of nineteen days, another nice aspect of the Fast this year is that I’ve been closely following the nineteen days website. It’s a nice reminder that people all over the world are engaging in this same spiritually cleansing and reflecting process. Plus it’s a visual banquet. After you explore it, check out every morn and eve, a sister site for the rest of the year.

It’s a great time of the year to revel in beauty. One final note: the book cover image associated with this post was designed by my Uncle Bob, aka Robert Reddy, who is continually producing astonishing beauty over at Progress Gallery. Happy spring!

Light My Fire 2 (CC / BY-NC-ND 2.0 by Daniel Y. Go)

Last week I posed this question: “How do you feel about the idea of ‘burnout’ with respect to service? Any idea why it doesn’t sit well with me?” There were lots of thoughtful comments both in this space, on Facebook, and in “real life.” I don’t have a fully articulated answer, but here are a few thoughts culled from those various conversations.

Just about everyone I spoke with talked about “balance.” Balance is an interesting metaphor, because it implies dichotomy. Picture a balance, essentially like a teeter-totter on a playground. The implication is that there are two distinct weights, one on either side, and we are trying to balance the two of them. If our life is meant to be a united whole, then this metaphor of balance implies separation and distinction between service on the one side, and whatever else we wish to balance on the other. So while balance is a common part of our discourse, it actually carries with it some ideas that don’t align with my conceptual framework.

In one of the conversations, the metaphor of the bicycle wheel was introduced. Here, service is at the center – the hub where the spokes of the wheel meet. Life has many components, but they all radiate out from service. One compelling part of this metaphor is that you can get rid of a few spokes and still have a functioning bicycle wheel, but if you take out too many, the wheel falls apart. Similarly, if you take out the center – service – then the wheel cannot function at all. It loses any meaning as a wheel.

Phillipe, over at Baha’i Thought, noted that burnout is an observable psychological phenomenon, which was fascinating. And Delara commented here on the blog (yay!) about how we may not realize how many different acts in our daily life can be undertaken in a spirit of helping others – which is one of the definitions of service we learn in the junior youth group.

Thyolo, Malawi (© Bahá’í World Centre. All rights reserved.)

Day Thirteen of the Baha’i Fast. Yesterday, Negin and I were preparing for junior youth group. As it turned out, no one was home. But the preparation was great. Since we are in the midst of expanding the group, we reflected on some of the initial conversations we might want to have with new participants. And given our experience with a service project last week, we tried to assemble a set of concepts related to service.

With the help of Releasing the Powers of Junior Youth, the fifth book in the Ruhi Institute, we determined the following sequence of ideas:

1. That we all need other people; that we all depend on one another.
2. A question: Who do you depend on? Can you imagine a world where we never received help from anyone?
3. A definition: service is any act undertaken in the spirit of helping others
4. We just had an experience with service last week. Use the three elements of cooperation to analyze our service project.
   • A common goal: What was the goal of our service project?
   • Collaboration: How did we all participate? What did each of us contribute, and in what ways would the service project not have been possible had we lacked the contribution of any one of us?
   • Coordination: How did we coordinate our actions? Possibly provide external examples of coordination. e.g. Imagine two people meeting to construct a fence. If one comes on Monday, and the other on Tuesday, they cannot build the fence.

It was wonderful to realize that the concepts introduced in earlier books (in the context of teaching cooperative games to young children) are not separate from the concepts used later on in the sequence.

Light My Fire 1 (CC / BY-NC-ND 2.0 by Daniel Y. Go)

Had a wonderful non-lunch with PJ Andrews yesterday. We talked about service, and it was just generally good to see him after a few months of not having done so. Toward the end of our visit, one topic that came up was the idea of burnout, and how you maintain the energy for service. I didn’t have a ready answer, and so we agreed that this was a topic we would continue to explore. I did express, though, a feeling that this notion of “burnout” felt wrong – today I might say it was somehow embedded in a false dichotomy, perhaps between service and relaxation, or altruism and self-interest.

What do you think? How do you feel about the idea of “burnout” with respect to service? Any idea why it doesn’t sit well with me?