Confessions of a Fair Trade Shade Grown Vegan Hipster II

The first edition happened last summer in the monsoons of Mumbai. This edition comes from a new Chelsea resident as she gears up for TEDGlobal and the TEDx organizers workshop on June 9th.

Just as recap for people who missed the last one, I am not actually vegan or any of those other things. A friend coined this label for me a few years ago jokingly and it kind of stuck with some of our other friends. It is all in jest.

Well, a year ago I was living in an apartment in Colaba, waiting for the rains to come and take away the heat of Mumbai's early summers. I've come to the point where I miss India. I was reading Shantaram over the last few weeks and it made me miss it even more. I could imagine the scenes taking place in different areas of the city where I spent a good deal of time last summer. I could feel the heat burning my arms and the rains flowing in and out of my plastic shoes.... it was such a treat to read something that took me back there as much as this book did.

Sometimes it takes a year to see and remember what is worth seeing/remembering. For me, anyway, this is very true. I have a few friendships and projects that took time to settle and be everything that I hoped they would be.

Most importantly, I think I learned that we really can't expect every experience/relationship/project to turn out the same way. That seems really basic, especially when I write it out, but it took me a while to process that -- especially with friendships. We learn different things from different people. Why shouldn't the relationship reflect that? I think I'm a lot happier in understanding that we're all trying to do our best being ourselves. And in that, we all have to give a little bit of space to quirks and character. Just as people have to do with me. Plus, it would be really boring if all friendships were identical and taught you the same things. So, really, this is a good discovery for me.

This granola cruncher is getting ready now to leave for TEDGlobal. A perfect loop -- I went for the first time after I graduated from High school, and now I am back. As a recent college graduate. I'm excited to be back in the TEDx organizers Workshops -- TEDxYale is presenting best University level TEDx practices this time. So I'll be up there, giving a 4 minute talk alongside some other really awesome organizers from different TEDx conferences around the world. And then, of course, there is the part where we'll be in beautiful historic Edinburgh...

Catch me June 9th, 9am BST, 4am EST here

I think life works in loops sometimes -- as I said before, I rarely say "Goodbye" because there is a good chance that I will be back in some capacity in the future. I think I like it that way.

Yes, people do move on and fill gaps in their lives when we leave. But sometimes it doesn't matter as much -- like those friendships you go back to after months and it's exactly the same. Sometimes it changes things a lot, but the friendship matures with it. And other times, things need to fade into the background because it is healthier for both of you. There is nothing wrong with that, either.

While some of my friendships from home have grown and shifted with the past few years, we all found ourselves downtown watching the Bruins game in a sports bar last night. Things have changed -- we talked about the apartment and job search instead of things we were talking about in our classes or doing that weekend, but we're still friends. More seasoned, we love Boston more fiercely as a resulting of moving out of the city and being able to come back. I think we only grew to love it more after the Boston Marathon this spring...

So. Here's to time and patience and friendships that can grow along with you.

A Year of Tomorrows

A dear friend of mine (actually, two friends of mine) are enlisting. One of them entertained me with stories of his experience in a nearby ROTC program (since Yale, until recently) did not offer a program for it. He woke up earlier than most of us ever did and worked very hard, making friends and learning a discipline that I was never exposed to besides the conversations that we shared on the topic. His commitment was inspirational to a lot of us. And it was a pleasure to open my email this morning and glow with pride for his accomplishments.

Though I was able to learn more about it over the course of the year, I came from a very academically focused family. We value service and I have devoted a lot of time to find ways to serve and solve interesting problems. But this service is very different in its mindset and goals.

It was a transition for me to embrace. The other friend is someone I have known for many years now and has been adopted into my life in a way I never really expected from someone whose politics are very different from mine. First we learned to coexist and respect each other, and quickly we became very close friends. We're both pretty quirky. I think that's what did it.

So when he told me for the first time that he planned to enlist once we graduated, I watched him with the same measured stare that he gave me from across the table. "Oh. " was all I could muster.

I am endlessly proud of him. The same way I am of my own younger brother. Though he was too modest about his accomplishments to tell me things himself, like when his next cross country race would be, or that he was killing it at higher level physics, math, and economics classes, or when he did particularly well in a race. I learned how to ask. Though too often I forgot to.

It was a year (or several years) of tomorrows. I would go to his race, tomorrow. We would catch up, tomorrow. There was always tomorrow. We sure as hell enjoyed the todays. The todays when we went to a driving range (golf) and both tried to see who could hit the golf ball furthest (he won), or hit the truck picking up the balls (I won), and ended up ripping the skin off my hands because I only know how to swing golf clubs the way I learned to use a field hockey stick. I think he pulled a muscle in his arm that day. Clearly, neither of us had any idea what we were doing and probably looked ridiculous. The todays were early morning runners to our favorite diner, no matter how early he had to leave the next day. Or the afternoons when he would dry the running clothes that he had used earlier on his car, after he washed them in our sink, and my mom would insist that he try the washing machine upstairs. Or the afternoon when I called him after the marathon bombings and he tried to make it better. We had a lot of todays. But always with the promise of tomorrow. He wasn't going away... yet.

This is how I have conceptualized my goodbyes: it's not goodbye, almost ever. It's not hard to stay in touch or reach out, and we may very well cross paths again. We can have years of todays and tomorrows.

But I am wary of putting too little weight in the time that I do have with some of my friends before we part ways in the directions we've decided to take. It's not goodbye, but time and space add their own elements to friendships, relationships and conversations. We wont always have shared contexts.

He left with a friendship bracelet that I made for him -- just like I did our freshman year. I guess, in that way, I'm still right there, as he knows I always will be. Even when I cannot be physically present.

Cleaning Out My Closet

I cleaned out my closet today. For people who know me well, this is a big deal. I am a pack rat. Or, actually that isn’t terribly accurate because I pack extremely lightly when I travel. My overnight bag to New York last week was my handbag with a change of clothes and my toothbrush in it, outside of the usual.

It is more accurate for me to say that I am a bit of a hoarder. I like to keep things with the reasoning I might need this later. How often does that ACTUALLY happen? Almost never.

It’s not so much the objects that I am hoarding. I don’t like the clutter, but I get used to it. I think it’s the memories that we attach to things. You remember the person you wore that horrible pink sweater with that you wore when you thought it was a good idea at age 12. The half empty tube of pink lipstick from my first skating competition (finally threw it away after deciding it smelled too much like wax and was a color I would never wear in public again). The shoes that you love and wore all the time but part of the sole has worn through and the other shoe is slightly too small and gives your blisters every time you wear them. The book you read over and over again while your mother told you to turn on the light because you were reading in the dark and going to hurt your eyes one day (she was right…).

It was nice to be so close to some of these memories again, but it was also refreshing to look back and see how far I’ve come. You realize that life really is constantly changing, and when things aren’t as expected, you haven’t actually disappointed anyone.

I saw some of my oldest friends last night. We’ve all been apart for many years now, but we decided to meet up in Boston and have drinks outside. Boston is in the perfect stage of summer right now – the evening was warm but breezy. And yes, we’ve all gone in different directions and couldn’t believe that we made it to this point (We met when we were 11 years old and were learning to tie-dye. Now we were sitting in an outdoor bar in Boston…) but some things were exactly the same.

This revisiting of old memories has helped me figure out more of my research work for Colombia. I’ve been working through sources like crazy, and each day the details of its history get more and more confusing. Some parts are so clear and familiar, and then there are others that never make sense to me. Some of my frustrations with Mexico jump out at me from the pages of David Bushnell’s The Makings of Modern Colombia. People, individuals from my past trips there stand out in my mind. Their kindness, their hope, their spirit that moves me to tears. And in the background is this extreme violence and the threatening undertones of a storm brewing beneath every word, interaction, and trip to the zocalo. How do we reconcile ourselves with the past? On paper it is easy to reject and throw things away, because pragmatically we know that forgiving, forgetting, and essentially tossing out the bad feelings will improve society. But as a person, how do you let go of this past? This fiber that ties us all together and creates a history that goes beyond what I find inside of my closet or the conversation that I had with a friend I made while I was figuring out who I was?

I’m giving it time, but I think this thesis work is going to be more than just a paper. There is a lot that I want to understand about my obsessions and illicit markets, but for many reasons Colombia made sense for me to study at this point in my life.

My heart is in Mexico. But I know that I cant be back there right now and do the things that I want to do. Colombia is the close cousin, with one arm open to take me in while I wait. She offers a rich history of a people captured in a single frame in the media and the secrets that all of the Latin Americans I know live with every day of our lives. There is a love of life that I cannot describe, the same kindness and the hauntingly beautiful and diverse landscape of a country that suffers the same multiple personality disorder of my own. This could be me letting go a little bit.

I cannot wait.