lip gunk

lip gloss is a messy affair.
i have a little wand-in-gloss stick i carry around which i got for really cheap at zara in dubai. the problem with cheap gloss is that it is often too viscous and sticky. so after the glam slam smother and smack, suddenly a gust blows and your hair flies onto your face. but rather than being ad-worthy windblown, too many strands of hair get stuck in my just-applied, overly viscous lip gloss. fuck. then as i try to pull my hair out of my lips, the gloss pulls onto my face also, which i have to inconspicuously wipe off. TAT GLAM.

facebook fantasy

so i was recently re-introduced to facebook due to some unfortunate incident.
that prompted me to log into my account after 6 months and to my surprise, i
found a nice pile of 22 friend requests which made me feel suddenly very
popular. *pat on back*

i decided to get with the social networking program and acknowledged those
friends/acquaintances that remember me.

one day i logged in to find that i was TAGGED in some horrendous looking
pictures. TAT GLAM SIA. how the f was i supposed to get rid of something that
didn't belong to me?? i asked my facebook guru colleague and he showed me how to
remove tags. so i started eliminating those terrible caught in the middle of
something unglam shots but had to deal with the painful reality that while they
were out of sight for me, they still belonged to someone's album to which i had
no reach.

i started out only knowing how to get to my inbox and replying to messages, but
for a week i was perplexed as to how to see ALL my friends?? i kept
clicking on the FRIENDS button (naturally) only to have the ones who had
recently tagged a photo or bought someone a martini show up. finally my
colleague came over and showed me on the drop down i could select ALL FRIENDS.
ahh what revelations that make your day.

new to the social networking game, i started prying into my friends' networks
and felt like a little voyeur. how do i get more friends i asked myself.
following fede's lead when he started adding my friends to his network, i
started taking the liberty of ADDING FRIENDs from other friends. i wondered if
people minded that i was circumventing them to meet their friends. but facebook
was now my shield- i could now add/poke/message someone whom i had never spoken
to in person for more than 10 minutes, all without the awkward small talk and bs
of really caring. PLUS i add to my growing network of friends and i feel a
little more popular each time. *more pats on back*

i just added a Where I've Been application on my profile/wall/account(??) - go
check it out, my newly made friends!

Distorted by today's political lenses, European historical memory selectively focuses on past violence perpetrated by Muslims and either forgets Europe's cultural borrowings from Muslim societies, or regards them as unimportant remnants of a closed chapter in European-Muslim relations.

Fourteen European countries have been wholly or partly under Muslim rule for at least one of the last 14 centuries. With the exception of Spain, national memory in all of these lands either minimizes this experience or portrays the era of Muslim dominion as one of unrelieved oppression and barbarity.

Violence is the dominant motif of Western histories on Islamic relations. Everyone is reminded on a regular basis that a Muslim army penetrated deep into northern France in 732 before being heroically stopped by Charles Martel at Tours, and another Muslim army laid siege to Vienna in 1529 before being turned back by bad weather and heroic defenders.

And they are similarly reminded that their own Crusader ancestors seized Jerusalem from the Saracen unbelievers and held it for almost a century. That Crusader conquest and rule might have involved oppression and barbarity is generally omitted from the story.

From episodes like this, today's ideologues concoct a myth of unending and merciless hostility between Islam and the West.

But even the military tale is selectively told. Who recalls that France's Renaissance monarch Francis I allied with the Muslim Ottoman ruler Suleiman the Magnificent to fight against his Christian rival Charles V of Spain? Who remembers that many generations of Muslim Tatars fought for Christian Polish kings against their Christian foreign enemies?

Closer to the present, Europeans are slow to recall the tens of thousands of Muslim soldiers from West Africa and India who fought and died on the Western Front in World War I against what the French and the British then thought of as the "barbaric Huns"? And who chooses to remember the reliance the United States placed on Afghanistan's Muslim warriors in their struggle against the "godless atheists" of the Soviet Union in the 1980s?

Muslims who have fought on behalf of Western political interests have been forgotten. Muslims who have confronted the West militarily are remembered. Not only remembered, but taken as examples of an imaginary eternal opposition between Islam and the West.

Meanwhile, the diverse and long-standing peaceful side of European-Muslim relations remains in shadow. When you arise in the morning, your toothbrush and the hard soap you wash with are borrowings from the Muslim world. At breakfast, your orange juice and coffee come from the Muslims, and so does the sugar you put in your coffee and the clear glass and glazed coffee cup you drink from. You read your newspaper. Both paper and the idea of printing are borrowings from Muslim society. What do you do later? Play chess? Eat pasta? Play your guitar? All from the Muslim world.

Beyond daily life, of course, there are myriad other borrowings from Muslim societies, particularly in the areas of medicine, chemistry and philosophy. Today these are normally treated as irrelevancies from a long ago time. But that seemingly irrelevant long ago time was actually the time of the Crusades that so many think are still highly relevant. The languages of all European countries contain hundreds of words of Arabic, Persian or Turkish origin, mostly dealing with science (alcohol, algebra), consumer goods (sugar, coffee), and elegant living (lute, damask).

How is Muslim culture enriching us now? Through the phenomenally popular poems of Rumi, one might answer. Through story characters like Aladdin, Ali Baba and Sinbad the Sailor, who have become stock figures in popular entertainment. Through contemporary Iranian films. Through the spiritual experiences of people in the West who convert to Islam. Through the working lives of the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who, despite anti-immigrant sentiment and religious hostility, choose not to give in to extremist appeals.

Europe needs to come to grips with its past. This could best be done by a multinational commission charged with reviewing every aspect of the history of Muslims in, and versus, Europe. The parallel history of Europeans in, and versus, Muslims outside of Europe is of equal importance; but that has already been addressed in hundreds of books devoted to imperialism and its beneficial or baleful consequences.

There are two reasons why this urgent chore needs to be addressed internationally. First, a number of countries - Serbia and Bulgaria come to mind - have built a myth of demonic Muslim occupation into nationalist ideologies that no longer ring true, however serviceable they may once have been during struggles for independence. These myths need to be re-examined outside the nationalist context.

Secondly, Muslims must be granted a role in reconsidering their history within Europe. Modern efforts at reconciliation around the world have amply demonstrated that disputed histories cannot be clarified without participation by the parties concerned.

Throughout contemporary Europe the debate over Islam and Muslims proceeds at a fevered pace. But without a comprehensive understanding of the past, all sides in the debate build on weak foundations. Working internationally to build that comprehensive understanding will serve the future as much as the past


Richard Bulliet is professor of history at Columbia University and author of "Islam: A View from the Edge" and "The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization." This article was distributed by Agence Global.

Buying Into The Green Movement

Alex Williams of the NY Times talks about the dilemma that plagues me everyday because i am such a consumer:

HERE'S one popular vision for saving the planet: Roll out from under the sumptuous hemp-fiber sheets on your bed in the morning and pull on a pair of $245 organic cotton Levi's and an Armani biodegradable knit shirt.

Stroll from the bedroom in your eco-McMansion, with its photovoltaic solar panels, into the kitchen remodeled with reclaimed lumber. Enter the three-car garage lighted by energy-sipping fluorescent bulbs and slip behind the wheel of your $104,000 Lexus hybrid.


Drive to the airport, where you settle in for an 8,000-mile flight-- careful to buy carbon offsets beforehand -- and spend a week driving golf balls made from compacted fish food at an eco-resort in the Maldives.

That vision of an eco-sensitive life as a series of choices about what to buy appeals to millions of consumers and arguably defines the current environmental movement as equal parts concern for the earth and for making a stylish statement.

Some 35 million Americans regularly buy products that claim to be earth-friendly, according to one report, everything from organic beeswax lipstick from the west Zambian rain forest to Toyota Priuses. With baby steps, more and more shoppers browse among the 60,000 products available under Home Depot's new Eco Options program.

Such choices are rendered fashionable as celebrities worried about global warming appear on the cover of Vanity Fair's ''green issue,'' and pop stars like Kelly Clarkson and Lenny Kravitz prepare to be headline acts on July 7 at the Live Earth concerts at sites around the world.

Consumers have embraced living green, and for the most part the mainstream green movement has embraced green consumerism. But even at this moment of high visibility and impact for environmental activists, a splinter wing of the movement has begun to critique what it sometimes calls ''light greens.''

Critics question the notion that we can avert global warming by buying so-called earth-friendly products, from clothing and cars to homes and vacations, when the cumulative effect of our consumption remains enormous and hazardous.

''There is a very common mind-set right now which holds that all that we're going to need to do to avert the large-scale planetary catastrophes upon us is make slightly different shopping decisions,'' said Alex Steffen, the executive editor of Worldchanging.com, a Web site devoted to sustainability issues.

The genuine solution, he and other critics say, is to significantly reduce one's consumption of goods and resources. It's not enough to build a vacation home of recycled lumber; the real way to reduce one's carbon footprint is to only own one home.

Buying a hybrid car won't help if it's the aforementioned Lexus, the luxury LS 600h L model, which gets 22 miles to the gallon on the highway; the Toyota Yaris ($11,000) gets 40 highway miles a gallon with a standard gasoline engine.

It's as though the millions of people whom environmentalists have successfully prodded to be concerned about climate change are experiencing a SnackWell's moment: confronted with a box of fat-free devil's food chocolate cookies, which seem deliciously guilt-free, they consume the entire box, avoiding any fats but loading up on calories.

The issue of green shopping is highlighting a division in the environmental movement: ''the old-school environmentalism of self-abnegation versus this camp of buying your way into heaven,'' said Chip Giller, the founder of Grist.org, an online environmental blog that claims a monthly readership of 800,000. ''Over even the last couple of months, there is more concern growing within the traditional camp about the Cosmo-izing of the green movement -- '55 great ways to look eco-sexy,' '' he said. ''Among traditional greens, there is concern that too much of the population thinks there's an easy way out.''

The criticisms have appeared quietly in some environmental publications and on the Web.

GEORGE BLACK, an editor and a columnist at OnEarth, a quarterly journal of the Natural Resources Defense Council, recently summed up the explosion of high-style green consumer items and articles of the sort that proclaim ''green is the new black,'' that is, a fashion trend, as ''eco-narcissism.''

Paul Hawken, an author and longtime environmental activist, said the current boom in earth-friendly products offers a false promise. ''Green consumerism is an oxymoronic phrase,'' he said. He blamed the news media and marketers for turning environmentalism into fashion and distracting from serious issues.

''We turn toward the consumption part because that's where the money is,'' Mr. Hawken said. ''We tend not to look at the 'less' part. So you get these anomalies like 10,000-foot 'green' homes being built by a hedge fund manager in Aspen. Or 'green' fashion shows. Fashion is the deliberate inculcation of obsolescence.''

He added: ''The fruit at Whole Foods in winter, flown in from Chile on a 747 -- it's a complete joke. The idea that we should have raspberries in January, it doesn't matter if they're organic. It's diabolically stupid.''

Environmentalists say some products marketed as green may pump more carbon into the atmosphere than choosing something more modest, or simply nothing at all. Along those lines, a company called PlayEngine sells a 19-inch widescreen L.C.D. set whose ''sustainable bamboo'' case is represented as an earth-friendly alternative to plastic.

But it may be better to keep your old cathode-tube set instead, according to ''The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook,'' because older sets use less power than plasma or L.C.D. screens. (Televisions account for about 4 percent of energy consumption in the United States, the handbook says.)

''The assumption that by buying anything, whether green or not, we're solving the problem is a misperception,'' said Michael Ableman, an environmental author and long-time organic farmer. ''Consuming is a significant part of the problem to begin with. Maybe the solution is instead of buying five pairs of organic cotton jeans, buy one pair of regular jeans instead.''

For the most part, the critiques of green consumption have come from individual activists, not from mainstream environmental groups like the Sierra Club, Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network. The latest issue of Sierra, the magazine of the Sierra Club, has articles hailing an ''ecofriendly mall'' featuring sustainable clothing (under development in Chicago) and credit cards that rack up carbon offsets for every purchase, as well as sustainably-harvested caviar and the celebrity-friendly Tango electric sports car (a top-of-the-line model is $108,000).

One reason mainstream groups may be wary of criticizing Americans' consumption is that before the latest era of green chic, these large organizations endured years in which their warnings about climate change were scarcely heard.

Much of the public had turned away from the Carter-era environmental message of sacrifice, which included turning down the thermostat, driving smaller cars and carrying a cloth ''Save-a-Tree'' tote to the supermarket.

Now that environmentalism is high profile, thanks in part to the success of ''An Inconvenient Truth,'' the 2006 documentary featuring Al Gore, mainstream greens, for the most part, say that buying products promoted as eco-friendly is a good first step.

''After you buy the compact fluorescent bulbs,'' said Michael Brune, the executive director of the Rainforest Action Network, ''you can move on to greater goals like banding together politically to shut down coal-fired power plants.''

John Passacantando, the executive director of Greenpeace USA, argued that green consumerism has been a way for Wal-Mart shoppers to get over the old stereotypes of environmentalists as ''tree-hugging hippies'' and contribute in their own way.

This is crucial, he said, given the widespread nature of the global warming challenge. ''You need Wal-Mart and Joe Six-Pack and mayors and taxi drivers,'' he said. ''You need participation on a wide front.''

It is not just ecology activists with one foot in the 1970s, though, who have taken issue with the consumerist personality of the ''light green'' movement. Anti-consumerist fervor burns hotly among some activists who came of age under the influence of noisy, disruptive anti-globalization protests.

Last year, a San Francisco group called the Compact made headlines with a vow to live the entire year without buying anything but bare essentials like medicine and food. A year in, the original 10 ''mostly'' made it, said Rachel Kesel, 26, a founder. The movement claims some 8,300 adherents throughout the country and in places as distant as Singapore and Iceland.

''The more that I'm engaged in this, the more annoyed I get with things like 'shop against climate change' and these kind of attitudes,'' said Ms. Kesel, who continues her shopping strike and counts a new pair of running shoes -- she's a dog-walker by trade -- as among her limited purchases in 18 months.

''It's hysterical,'' she said. ''You're telling people to consume more in order to reduce impact.''

For some, the very debate over how much difference they should try to make in their own lives is a distraction. They despair of individual consumers being responsible for saving the earth from climate change and want to see action from political leaders around the world.

INDIVIDUAL consumers may choose more fuel-efficient cars, but a far greater effect may be felt when fuel-efficiency standards are raised for all of the industry , as the Senate voted to do on June 21, the first significant rise in mileage standards in more than two decades.

''A legitimate beef that people have with green consumerism is, at end of the day, the things causing climate change are more caused by politics and the economy than individual behavior,'' said Michel Gelobter, a former professor of environmental policy at Rutgers who is now president of Redefining Progress, a nonprofit policy group that promotes sustainable living.

''A lot of what we need to do doesn't have to do with what you put in your shopping basket,'' he said. ''It has to do with mass transit, housing density. It has to do with the war and subsidies for the coal and fossil fuel industry.''

In fact, those light-green environmentalists who chose not to lecture about sacrifice and promote the trendiness of eco-sensitive products may be on to something.

Michael Shellenberger, a partner at American Environics, a market research firm in Oakland, Calif., said that his company ran a series of focus groups in April for the environmental group Earthjustice, and was surprised by the results.

People considered their trip down the Eco Options aisles at Home Depot a beginning, not an end point.

''We didn't find that people felt that their consumption gave them a pass, so to speak,'' Mr. Shellenberger said. ''They knew what they were doing wasn't going to deal with the problems, and these little consumer things won't add up. But they do it as a practice of mindfulness. They didn't see it as antithetical to political action. Folks who were engaged in these green practices were actually becoming more committed to more transformative political action on global warming.''

now that im studying for the gmat and taking the princeton review classes (stop mocking me. i am just not a good test taker and need the extra help), i find myself scrutinizing tenses, whether the verbs match, am i using parallel construction? am i using the correct prepositional phrases and idioms? i am spending much more time than i thought i ever would and i haven't picked up a book or magazine in more than 3 weeks (other than the In Touch's and Us Weekly's i get at the nail salon).
because last week was crammed with moving and writing my final paper for my other class, i had to resort to hiding out in the office bathroom to do my gmat homework.

i am so conditioned to think about gmat that when i got too annoyed by angelina jolie's terrible accent on alexander, i actually flipped open my books and started doing some problems. either i am slightly off kilter or angie's acting was simply too repulsive.

on the topic of alexander- it is possibly one of the worst epics i have ever seen. the costumes shine so brilliantly everyone looks like they are in a broadway musical, not in ancient greek times. the dialogue is so inane and mindless i feel like they take the audience for fools. the actors are horribly cast and really do themselves as well as the characters they play such injustice. jared leto for example is the gay companion and loyal warrior to alexander- why when he would make a much better villain?? and colin farrell as a king? he lacks the presence and the stature and looks fucking ridiculous and unconvincing in his tacky wig and costumes. angelina is perfect as lara croft but there is only one pouty smoky expression she ever has and unfortunately she played out more like a jealous lover than a possessive mother to alexander. plus that terrible russian prostitute accent- god, it will be torturous to watch her with her french accent in a mighty heart.

and i cannot forgive the music that anticipates for the audience what is going to happen in the next 10 seconds. like victory music playing before the battle is over. ugh. horrendous movie. i rank it as low as the island.