Spring Break
Was Full of _________
A Word Challenge in San Diego

What does this spell? Can you make it out?



Click on the photo and read the tags on the right for the answer. It took the waitress "forever" to figure it out. Mom (visiting me from Michigan) got it in 15 seconds. Actually not in San Diego, this was from a restaurant near UCSD in La Jolla.

Labels: word game

Account Summary: Summer Plans, Fall Plans
After my third quarter plans
from San Diego to London to Beijing plans

My 20 credit hour quarter is over......never again will I take that many classes. I had to put just about every aspect of my life on hold. Next quarter I will have fewer classes, but they will demand even more focus. I've got to take finance and macro econ, plus the third quarter of quantitative methods (stats) and upper level Chinese. (I found a cool site where you can make and share flashcards). Plus I started as the "website development intern" at IR/PS. Here's my first article with pictures. It's nice being paid to attend, photograph, and write about events I would otherwise take part in. I'll continue my presidency at the Chinese Language Film Society. And last week I started a group of Roots & Shoots, Jane Goodall's global youth network. We'll be doing lots of things, which I've decided to do instead of write about.

I drank a Red Bull to try to get an essay pumped out tonight. My mom is visiting me from Michigan starting tomorrow for a week and I won't have time to write while she's here. But somehow updating my blog is easier than writing about environmentalism and the development of civil society in China.

So, it looks like I've secured my absolute dream internship this summer and fall. I'll be interning with AccountAbility in London this summer. Then I'll be going to Beijing in the fall to work with the head of CSR for Bayer Drug Co., China. What this will entail exactly is not clear, but involves defining AccountAbility's China strategy. It also means working with the founder and the research team on some of AccountAbility's pet projects in China, and may include surveying consumers on willingness to pay for environmentally friendly products. This means I'll take a quarter off and graduate a quarter late. Oh well. My friends told me I'd have a hard time staying in one place for too long.

I never imagined my environmentalism would lead me on the path I'm walking now. A year ago I was looking for Chavez and an apartment in Caracas, totally flabbergasted at corporate environmental destruction, opposed to just about every form of consumerism. Now I'm donning the uniform, walking the corridors of responsibility, promoting smart solutions consumer patterns, and working with environmental and business leaders to create the frameworks that will transform the destructive habits of today's disparate global entities. Yeah, there were times this quarter when I thought that learning accounting, statistics, and international politics were some of the last things I should be doing with my life, but truly they were not. I am learning to speak a language that is not my own. (And I'm not talking about Chinese). What wonder may come!

Labels: AccountAbility, Beijing, CSR, fall, internship, London, plans, summer, UCSD

Lizard Attack!
Or, An Early Morning Visitor
in my San Diego Apartment


I had just woken up and was heading to the bathroom. I didn't have my glasses on. Then I saw this line on my floor. "A snake!," I screamed to my friend on the phone. "Wait, no, a lizard."

I'm perfectly fine with amphibians, but reptiles weird me out. Snakes scare me and lizards look a lot like snakes.

But this guy was friendly. I put him in a box and let him go outside.

My roommate and I haven't been able to identify him, but we think he's may be a "western fence lizard." Any lizard experts out there?

My Old Ann Arbor Loft:
Now a "Motor City Crib"
according to Metro Times
Metro Times featured my old roommate Chris Bathgate, rising star in the folk music scene in a recent article.

Bathgate's Ann Arbor home is a co-op and former dancehall located above Wazoo Records. In a time when downtown Ann Arbor is beginning to resemble Royal Oak, the Arbor Vitae co-op is one of the few remaining remnants of the city's freer times, circa the 1960s and early '70s. Arbor Vitae started off as a dancehall (there’s a half inch of sand under the floor to deaden sound), then it became a corset factory and even a miniature golf course until the late, self-proclaimed peace planner Rich Ahern turned the loft — with soaring, two-story wood ceilings! — into a community living space.

Check out the article. Great photos!

And here's the column I wrote about Arbor Vitae. (It should be "Soul of the City," not "Sould of the City", a column I wrote the summer before my year of "spiritual madness"). I wrote the piece after falling in love with Arbor Vitae and its inhabitants. I tracked down Rich and soon after he became my "spacelord." Cue dark, ominous music for anticlimax...Rich just rented the space, and didn't own the land, so he couldn't have been a landlord. Hence, spacelord.

More Arbor Vitae photos.

Labels: a2, Ann Arbor, Arbor Vitae, Chris Bathgate, Loft Living, Rich Ahern