it's not just about having good hair

and posting photos. so this post equals 10,000 words!

words cannot describe the pristine beauty of this place.
i can´t believe how wonderful it is...
feliz navidad.

and it´s 80 degrees. and light until 9.
i heart argentina!
i had a decent flight courtesy of some magical spanish sleeping pill. it would have been better except for the poor parenting. i don´t get it. can you please tell your kid to shut up at 3 a.m. on a plane full of sleeping people ´(i can´t find the question mark key or i´d type it). anyway, i hate it when parents don´t ask their kids to be more polite in the name of ´´not stifling junior´s creativity.´´ to that i say boo.
more when i get a faster computer
i heart argentina!

I fired off my last obligation of the 2008 school year tonight. I'm looking forward to some relaxation on the plane to Argentina...then a day in Buenos Aires by myself. Followed by a backpacking adventure with la familia Lozano in Patagonia.
If I can update from Argentina, I shall! Stay tuned...and patient.

I'm headed here this week. The Lozano familia has decided Christmas during a South American summer beats Home on the Range. This year, anyway.
Dad called me last week and let me know that it is less like a spa vacation and more like Outward Bound. My brain (melted from a combination of no exercise, finals, and procrastination) wasn't ready for that, but thank heavens for all the gear I've acquired over the years. I'll be quite colorful and warm. Thanks, pro cycling!
Now, some images to assure you that I'll reward my loyal readers with pics of my own when the interwebz allows!


PS: I will feel like a complete hosebag because some of my gear says "Patagonia" on it without really earning it. I love yuppie gifts.

Though the first year of your MBA is a biatch...the second year doesn't get much easier. What sucks the most is that it has the perception of being easier because it is more flexible. It's like suddenly you get thrown from the military into an internet startup. Strange. Your schedule is your own after a year of allowing yourself to be told what to do every 15 minutes. But you trust the process. You really do.

The Darden Prom was held last night at the Doubletree. They won't let us get so silly on grounds, I guess. Jonny's thumb keeps him from shaving. Which is rather fetching, actually. Here he is with mancrush Alexander Boyatt.Our little Belgian Henri attempted to nom nom on the gingerbread house.

(pic of hawtties by Jessica Roeder)

"Converging on these towns, relos have segregated themselves, less by the old barriers of race, religion, and national origin than by age, family status, education, and, especially, income. Families with incomes of $100,000 head for subdivisions built entirely of $300,000 houses; those earning $200,000 trade up to subdivisions of $500,000 houses. Isolated, segmented, and stratified, these families are cut off from the single, the gay and the gray, and, except for those tending them, anyone from lower classes.
"Unlike their upper-middle-class kindred - the executives, doctors, and lawyers who settle down in one place - relos forgo the old community props of their class: pedigree and family ties; seats on the vestry and the hospital board; and the rituals, like charity balls. Left with the class's emblematic cars, Lilly Pulitzer skirts and Ralph Lauren shirts, their golf, tennis, and soccer, and, most conspicuously, their houses, they have staked out their place and inflated the American dream.
"'What is the American dream?' said Karen Handel, chairwoman of the Fulton County Commission in Alpharetta. 'It's to have a house of your own, the biggest house you can afford, on the biggest lot you can afford, with a great school for your kids, a nice park to spend Saturday afternoons with your kids in, and deep in amenities that get into the trade-offs with traffic.'"
-Class Matters, by correspondents of The New York Times

This

Will

Never

Be

Me

Some days I feel like an evangelical lunatic, one botox-foreheaded, polyester suit-wearing and falsely-tanned husband away from being on those triple-digit channels spouting about the coming Rapture. During which all Humvee-driving fools will be swept into the smokestacks of Owens-Corning and slowly incinerated amid glass insulation fibers.
This might be one of those days. A few weeks ago I blogged about Garrett Hardin and his wise words on population growth, the tragedy of the commons, and our contribution to the demise of a planet humans want to live on (let's leave out the fact that I'm not sure we are any more deserving of a species for perpetuation than the fruitfly and frankly the fruitfly can survive much better than us fragile nancypantses).
This week Professor Landel has done it again and assigned a reading from The Sustainability Institute on leverage points in systems dynamics and how we can use our understanding of systems to affect profound change.
Ever since that epiphanous (made that word up) day running in the Oregon woods in December of 2005, I have been seeking numbers 1 & 2 & 3 on Donella Meadows' list without wavering. Sure, I'll spend plenty of times on numbers 4-12, with special emphasis on 9-12 as most junior-level marketers do (and appropriately so).
In my mind's eye it's always been 1 & 2 & 3. I just didn't know it by name until now. And no, I don't think aspiring for those three points makes me any more or less cool. It's just that important to me.
"Hallelujah Amerikkuh! I have seen the light and it's name is..."
(Never mind. Just read it.)