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{click on the title to read the full post} alleviate | Livesay [Haiti] Weblog
Any group (faith based or otherwise) that wants to invest in alleviating the orphan crisis should consider finding ways to keep families together before operating a program that institutionalizes children. Removing children from their families and placing them in an institution doesn’t so much alleviate the problem as it does change the problem.
The Case for Breaking Up With Your Parents | The Chronicle of Higher Education
While Lambert, author of “Nonstop,” admires the multitasking undergraduates Harvard attracts, he also worries about the intellectual and emotional costs of such all-consuming busyness. In a turn toward gravitas, he quotes the French film director Jean Renoir’s observation that “the foundation of all civilization is loitering” and wonders aloud if “unstructured chunks of time” aren’t necessary for creative thinking. And while careful to phrase his concerns ever so delicately—this is the Harvard alumni magazine, after all—he seems afraid that one reason today’s students are so driven and compulsive is that they have been trained up to it since babyhood: From preschool on, they are accustomed to their parents pushing them ferociously to make use of every spare minute.
Nothing You Can Say Can Tear Me Away | Stacey Robbins
We call ourselves bastions of love and spiritually enlightened because we had the good sense to choose ‘our guy’ but we mock and are mean and actually feel good about being kinda rotten because we have no sense of connection to this other guy, who’s not ‘our guy’. We haven’t chosen him so, no matter what he does, he’s screwed in our eyes.
When Charity Turns Toxic | RELEVANT Magazine
You want this to be a meaningful experience for your group. But if most of your planning energy is invested toward ensuring the event will be “a life-changing experience” for your members, this may be a clue that the event’s focus is more about serving your group than serving the poor.
And what it all boils down to is this: because you can’t unsee what you’ve seen or unlearn what you’ve learned, what do you do with the knowledge that we live in a world where people are, with some regularity, THIS awful to each other? Where loving someone and trusting them utterly and with abandon doesn’t buy you any guarantees that they won’t hurt you horribly – perhaps even just for their own amusement and nothing else – down the road? And once you’ve had that awfulness enacted on you a few times, how do you respond? Do you build high walls? Do you become a recluse, move to the mountains, and renounce humanity? Do you stop trusting people with the tenderest and most delicate parts of you, for fear they’ll unexpectedly turn around and gut you one day, as others have? What?
In this instance, I actually let go of something that I had always fantasized about – having a dream home in a dream neighborhood, (whatever that meant, the specifics changed daily). I changed my attitude. When I was divided about where I lived, I focused on the future, and how a dream home would fix everything. No longer divided, living in the present moment, I was able to focus on my home. As soon as that happened, external change started to occur. Internal change always has to come first, starting with attitude. It is shocking actually, what can happen when you stop hiding from the present moment. Instead of just living with things the way they were, I began to perfect them.
Media obsession with returning to a post-baby body is crazy | MamaPop
This is the same bowl of Hollywood youth bull malarkey that they always feed us, just with another name. Don’t eat it. It makes you sad. Better to eat a little ice cream and enjoy your life. Remember the obvious subtext of the message that a woman must look, immediately if not sooner, like she never gave birth. Same-same. We must be young. We must be “unused.” We must be in the bloom of youth to be desirable, without the “marks” of our life or our babies.
The New Faces of International Adoption? | SISTERHAITI
They’ve heard the statistics that there are 147 million orphans in the world. Perhaps they went to a Christian conference where leaders were shouting from the rooftop that it’s a Christian’s duty to rescue one of the millions of children waiting in orphanages. Certainly they’ve watched the popular “gotcha day” videos where teary-eyed moms hold their babies for the first time and read the popular blogs. Understandably, they dream of similar videos and blogs of their own. It’s no wonder these families are fired up and ready to rescue a baby. Except that in reality, these waiting, adoptable “healthy” babies just don’t exist.
It’s a very weird reality to live in when you can read what thousands of strangers are currently thinking about you, both good and bad. Weird mostly in the fact that people who are saying the bad things either don’t realize that, you know, HEY! I’m standing right here and I CAN HEAR YOU. Or they just don’t have the generosity to realize that they are talking about/to a human being, one whose creative success was probably made possible because she has mined her own insecurities, shortcomings, thin skin and pain.
Club Unicorn: In which I come out of the closet on our ten year anniversary | The Weed
If you are Mormon and you choose to live your religion, you are sacrificing the ability to have a romantic relationship with a same-sex partner. If you choose a same-sex partner, you are sacrificing the ability to have a biological family with the one you love. And so on. No matter what path you choose, if you are gay you are giving up something basic, and sometimes various things that are very basic. I chose not to “live the gay lifestyle,” as it were, because I found that what I would have to give up to do so wasn’t worth the sacrifice for me.
People Pleasing: Not So Much A Pleasure | Jenny Ingram
The thing about living the life of a people pleaser… no one is ever pleased. Not for long. There is always more performing and pleasing to be done because everyone has their very own unique filter they see life through.
