Colleen Taylor

One thing I've learned over time, as cliche as it sounds, is that it's the simple things that count. An excerpt from a chat today:

[Friend]:  i just remembered i have some ice cream in the freezer N.B.:  What you're reading above is genuine elation, and genuine envy.

N.B. 2: We're currently in the midst of one of those brief, very infrequent San Francisco heat waves.  But I'd hope that I can be so easily pleased even about subjects other than ice cream, at times when it's not 90 degrees outside.

This past weekend's WSJ had a great piece written by an African woman, Dambisa Moyo, with a unique view on foreign aid to Africa. 

I really have no strong, well-formed personal opinion on the matter. Well, that's not exactly true-- I was happy to see the WSJ somewhat affirm my gut feeling that Project Red is sketchy at best and ineffective at worst.  Even I, a faithful Goop subscriber, can't pretend that this wasn't one of the most misguided ad campaigns ever.

Anyway, the WSJ article is long and somewhat complicated. Though it's worth reading the whole thing, I've pasted what I think is the 'nut graf' (journo speak for the part that tells you in a nutshell what you need to know) here:

Even what may appear as a benign intervention on the surface can have damning consequences. Say there is a mosquito-net maker in small-town Africa. Say he employs 10 people who together manufacture 500 nets a week. Typically, these 10 employees support upward of 15 relatives each. A Western government-inspired program generously supplies the affected region with 100,000 free mosquito nets. This promptly puts the mosquito net manufacturer out of business, and now his 10 employees can no longer support their 150 dependents. In a couple of years, most of the donated nets will be torn and useless, but now there is no mosquito net maker to go to. They'll have to get more aid. And African governments once again get to abdicate their responsibilities.

I hate to participate in whatever's left of the Web 2.0 echo chamber, but I couldn't hold myself back from commenting on the Huffington Post's most recent Julia Allison interview. 

I basically got all John Edwards in there, stopping just short of telling personal tales of helping my dad shop for steel-tipped work boots while growing up in Appalachia. (No, seriously, I could have done that. Red Wing Shoes in Monaca, PA, holler back!)

Normally it doesn't bother me when journalism is a bit elitist, because I understand the need for glamor and escapism. But sometimes it's just distressing how painfully out of touch some publications are from reality.

In the HuffPo interview, Julia dismisses jobs with the potential to pay "$50,000 a year" without directly mentioning how much she makes doing things differently. Well, it was reported earlier this month that her NonSociety venture pulled in net revenue of $60,000 last year. For those of you counting at home, that's $20,000 a year for each of her website's three editorial contributors, before paying for the site's programmers, hosting, servers, et cetera.

The elephant in the room, of course, is how she and her co-'Lifecasters' are really paying for their lifestyles.  I know there is a tiny, lovely, lucky group of people who, often because of a blend of familial support and a lack of student debt, don't have to pursue 9-5 jobs in their 20's. I think that's fantastic, really, and I can't knock them for it-- who knows, maybe someday my future children will be fortunate enough to be included among them. But I think it's strange for someone in such a rare and privileged position to publicly put down a certain occupation, or the kind of salary it can bring in.

What is even crazier to me is that reporters at publications like HuffPo are apparently also so out of touch that they don't call her out on it-- instead, they run stories about how Julia Allison is pioneering a new "business model" and a revolutionary form of "personal branding" or something. Um, what?

My alloted 250 words of real talk below (my comment is still pending, so I'm posting it here in case it doesn't make it past the HuffPo interns):

Have you read Ariel Levy's stuff in the New Yorker lately?  I can't really offer a better critique of her work than Emily Gould's assessment earlier this year: "Ariel Levy is completely taking the New Yorker to school and using it to clean the blackboard and then writing some new stuff on the blackboard which is awesome." 

Levy's article this week is centered largely around her interview with Lamar Van Dyke, a truly free-living Vietnam War era radical feminist lesbian who is now a grandmother in her 60's (but still really bad ass.) Although you really should just pick up the March 2nd issue and read the article-- you can't find it online-- I thought the last couple of paragraphs were especially worth sharing.

Regardless of the different people of different genders she has chosen over the years as her comrades, Van Dyke's primary loyalty has always been to her own adventure.  A woman in her sixties who has been resolutely doing as she pleases for as long as she can remember is not easy to come by, in movies or in books, or in life.

"Your generation wants to fit in," she told me, for the second time.  "Gays in the military and gay marriage?  This is what you guys have come up with?" There was no contempt in her voice; it was something else-- an almost incredulous maternal disappointment. "We didn't sit around looking at our phone or looking at our computer or looking at the television-- we didn't sit around looking at screens," she said. "We didn't wait for a screen to give us a signal to do something. We were off doing whatever we wanted."

And, I know this is my second "Remind me why we are on the Internet, anyway?" post in as many days. I'm not sure what that says.