In Memoriam: Benazir Bhutto

Today I didn't check the headlines until early afternoon and I was startled and deeply saddened to read that Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated. Her ethics and track record were not impeccable but she brought hope to many people both inside and out of Pakistan. She was also a captivating figure on a world stage heavily populated by greying middle aged men. On a more personal note, when I was in graduate school many years ago another student told me that I resembled Ms. Bhutto. I remember feeling very flattered by that comparison.

Upon learning that she will no longer grace the newspapers with her elegance, I was inspired to see if, in fact, I really did share a resemblance. My skills at self-portraiture (via handholding my digital camera) could certainly be improved, as could my ability to properly position a headscarf. Below is a sliver of an image I came up with. I'll let you decide for yourselves the strength of the resemblance, if any.

May Benazir Bhutto, and all of the Pakistanis who've been victims of political violence, rest in peace.

Icicles

Immediate, Internet

Despite the few comments this blog has inspired so far, I know people are reading it - or at least looking at the pages - based on statistics I receive. And sometimes people in my real life approach me with a question based on something they've read here, which temporarily throws me for a loop since - without a ton of comments - I don't know who, exactly, is reading this on a regular basis.

Having become accustomed to a practically invisible audience, and to my near anonymity in this space, I was quite taken aback to receive a comment on my last post about my experience in a focus group from a person at the company who organized the event. I had forgotten that news travels fast, if not immediately, on the Internet, with Google news alerts and other ways to track who is writing about what. And as much as I would enjoy having more people comment on my writing, it felt a bit strange to get a response from a corporate person on what had been until now a fairly intimate and personal endeavor.

Interview, of sorts

Last night I lost my "focus group virginity" at a bland office park in Waltham, MA. Lured by the promise of an honorarium and some snacks, I spent a few hours in a focus group for Constant Contact, the e-mail marketing company whose software I've been using for years. The snacks were pathetic - half-sandwiches of pale coldcuts and tired tunafish with shreds of iceberg lettuce slumped over the sides. I passed on the food and had a soda, and before long a few of us were chatting and commiserating over some of our technical difficulties with the product while waiting for the focus group to officially begin.

We were escorted into a bland but heavily miked conference room with a one-way mirror. There were nearly a dozen of us users, including academics, event planners, a church board member, and retailers. Several of us naively thought that Constant Contact was paying us each $125 so that they could get our input on how to improve their basic product, which allows one to create customized electronic newsletters, announcements invitations. But it quickly became clear that we had been invited for another reason, which was to give feedback on a proposed change in the user interface and other add-ons. The game then became how to respond to the questions in such a way that would also allow us to deliver feedback on the current product which has more features - and bugs - than its predecessor. The facilitator, an independent marketing professional with bleached highlights, pink nails and a poker face, did her best to keep the conversation on track. And a few of us in the room did our best to reiterate our basic concerns and suggestions, hoping that one of the many microphones would record our comments.

As a fan of Constant Contact and someone who has been monitoring their stock price ever since they went public a few months ago, I was a bit disappointed that the company is considering making mostly cosmetic changes to the user experience, rather than enhancing and deepening the functionality of its current product to keep pace with the increasingly sophisticated needs of its long-time customers. At the end of the evening, I was happy to receive my pink envelope of cash and decided to invest it in something other than their stock. At least for now.

Invierno

Winter is unmistakably here. Tiny snowflakes float gently but unrelentingly from the heavens, like a sprinkling of confectioner's sugar gone amok. These miniscule flakes are, one by one, creating spectacular drifts. I briefly opened my skylight to dislodge the accumulated snow only to have it be quickly recoated, enveloping me in a powdery blanket. My car is nearly completely covered with a fluffy quilt of snow.

It is only 8:20 a.m., on a Sunday, when most of the world is probably asleep, but I can hear the sounds of a neighbor's shovel stubbornly scraping against the pavement. The city's plows have already made several passes down my street, a main thoroughfare. Only 30 feet of unshoveled driveway stands between me and the clean road. Earlier this morning, while meditating, the sounds of my downstair's neighbors' snores percolated into my apartment. I will wait until they stir before attempting to shovel. And my shovel is in my car so I will have to bushwhack a trail to get to it. But I am not in a rush.

Intangible

A loyal reader has tossed this word at me. I'm catching it and running with it. This word is a bit of a paradox - we can see it, read it and speak it yet it refers to those things that we cannot discern or observe.

This evening I had tea with a woman from my synagogue whom I've been getting to know in our Rosh Chodesh group, a monthly women's gathering centering on spirituality. Both of us are trying to focus our attention on gratitude and appreciation and I saw her as a fellow traveler along a difficult path. It is very challenging, when accustomed to looking at the world, and the people, places and objects in it, as something that needs fixing or improvement, to try to notice all that is positive in our lives. I must constantly refocus my eye, which gravitates to details and loves to linger on the miniscule flaw, and zoom out and see the basically good big picture.

Another thing this woman and I share is our sensitivity to the vibrations of people and places, what for others might be completely intangible. She and I are a bit like Goldilocks, needing to try many chairs, porridges and beds before finding the ones that are "just right". Sometimes I envy people who can find a place to live in a short amount of time, can enjoy almost any situation and are at ease with a lot of people. If they have an inner sensor, it is not blinking yellow or flashing red as much as mine and hers do, or maybe these people have just decided to ignore it.

Ideology, the Danger of

There was a time when I stopped reading newspapers. I was on a diet of sorts, not for my body but for my mind, which was generating an unhealthy surplus of anxieties and fears. I was determined not to introduce any additional negative stimuli in the form of violent or depressing stories that would leave me feeling even more overwhelmed or despairing.

I'm not in such a dark place anymore and so I now do read the New York Times online. Typically I skim the headlines, check out the Letters to the Editor and poke around for feature articles. I am still on a news diet, trying to carefully select what information to feed my still impressionable brain. But sometimes I do give into the temptation to click on a headline that might lead to a longer and upsetting story.

And so it was that I read Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts, about how Malawi is now growing enough food for export after years in which it couldn't produce enough for domestic consumption. During those bleak years Malawi followed the World Bank's ideologically orthodox free market advice to not subsidize fertilizer. Without the fertilizer, farmers couldn't coax food out of the weak soil. Many people died of starvation. What is so sickening about the World Bank's advice is that the United States and Europe subsidize their farmers.

But after the 2005 harvest, the worst in a decade, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s newly elected president, decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached.

In my master's program, which each year produces a fresh crop of World Bank employees, I was indoctrinated in the dogma of free trade and free markets and could spout the ideology on command. Some of the economic theories underlying this ideology are seductive in their simple logic and beautiful when illustrated by an elegant curve on a graph. But insisting on transplanting these Ivory Tower ideas into Africa's, or at least Malawi's, barren terrain seems foolish at best and - in light of the resulting deaths - criminal at worst.