Rightly so, the sustainability food movement in the U.S. has been transformational for me personally.  Coming from Burma/Myanmar, where open air markets dominate and fresh fruit and local vegetables are a daily sight, I had always taken food for granted.  Back then, I was too busy, too cool to pay attention to food.  Meals were something I ate on the car when I commuted from school to evening classes, extra English courses and more extracurricular activities.  I didn’t want to become a typical Burmese girl.  I prided myself on the fact that cooking was not my forte.

This all changed when I arrived at Davidson College.  I happened to take Prof. Gibson’s “Food as Symbol and Spectacle” seminar (hands-down the BEST course at this institution) and actually read one of the books used in that course, The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood.  I have changed so much since then, starting from my research paper in the seminar that opened with the sentence, “Justice begins in the kitchen,” to my last semester’s campaign, “The Meatless Mondays,” which garnered participation from more than 350 students, for a campus with 1,700 students while a sizable junior class was away for abroad and despite the college’s not-so-friendly atmosphere for vegetarians and vegans … or any environmentalists in general.  The obsession with food got to the point where I even tried to apply for a Watson grant using food as my project, which would have been unthinkable in just four years ago.

This Davidson experience has been the reason for this blog (and its predecessor on xanga).  I have been keeping this blog, if anything, to monitor myself on where my interests lie throughout my college career.  My main audience is really just myself.  This is by no means a professional blog, not a food blog.  Not a feminist blog.  Nor an environmental blog.  The interrelated themes in this blog reflect my pockets of new interests that have become part of me.

But now that I have graduated, it is also time to conclude this blog and for me to move on, too.

Has the blog served me well?  Absolutely.  Do I want to further pursue any of the theme in-depth?  Now that’s a trickier part.

My lack of focus and a reluctance to specialize only testify to my “generalist” side, as opposed to the “specialist” persona.  There are many virtues to being a generalist, but at times, generalists can end up with a lack of purpose and a feeling of loss in the presence of a myriad of exciting venues to explore.  Generalists constantly suffer from opportunity costs.

Now that I am trying to accept my adulthood, I have to find a way to work around, without compromising my varied interests.  I don’t know why I never thought about this before, but sustainable tourism is something I’d like to devotedly pursue now.  And I have been to inspiring places, like Posada Amazonas and got some ideas.

First, I come from Burma, which is not known for its tourism, even though we have a rich civilization, a deep heritage and plenty of unique archeological sites.  People do not feel safe to visit us, even though the place is safer than you know because no one ever owns any guns and because of a Buddhist belief that committing suicide brings eternal bad karma, keeping people from playing any suicide bombing stunt.  Most of the time, Burmese are just too busy making ends meet, with little time to even conceive of terrorist activities.  I have American and international friends that have been pointed with a gun (even in a safe part of the town!), but I know no Burmese that has gone through the same horror.  (Maybe they were actually shot, woops).  Even in New York, the sight of fully armed guards and barricades are not news.  I have never been physically disrespected in Burma as a woman, but I was, in the nation’s capital Washington D.C.!  And Americans assert Burma is not a safe place to visit?

Thailand, for this reason, benefits from our shared culture and Burma’s notoriety – a status quo I would like to change.  I enjoy marketing and branding; I love traveling; I have a deep interest in food services but not enough to get serious as a chef (again, specialization); I am committed to sustainability; I have an appreciation for spatial meanings and culture (which I once mistook as an interest in becoming an architect).  And I want a job with human interactions and I am good with people.  Why not sustainable tourism?  This would even give me a reason to go back to South America and spend some time there.  I want to market my country the way Gaston has globalized Peruvian cuisine.  Imagine a future where American college kids will be asking for travel grants to re-create a “motorcycle diaries” in Burma.  And no, I don’t regret my political science undergrad major.  It’ll come to its use soon enough.

Margaret Atwood’s novel ends with Marian, the twenty-something graduate with her first job, as she calls off her engagement and quits her job to start a new but vague life plan.  She bakes a cake in the shape of a woman, and asks her fiancé to consume the edible, cake woman instead and let her go for good.

That was back in the sixties, you know.  But as you can see, I am faithfully obsessed with Atwood’s character to the end (although I’d have liked the opportunity to leave a nonexistent fiancé) .  This is the end of a blog, but the beginning of a new dream.  Specific and vague at the same time.  Who knows?  I may start another blog that fits my current state better, but The Edible Woman for sure has come to an end.  If I ever had any unintended audience during my journey to learn about myself, I have appreciated the readership and surely benefited from your comments.

For now, eat well till we meet again!

Just another edible woman.

Trends stay and go.  September is the January of the fashion calendar, which makes it the best time to strategically shop and manage your wardrobe.  Strategically is the key word here.  Many stores are getting rid of last season’s merchandise at a reduced price, while designers and media come up with a consensus on what will be the standard of beauty this year.  If you are aware of the ebbs and flows of the trends and if you know your personal style, it’s the best time to economically and fashionably revamp your closet.  You can be economical and ecological at the same time, reusing your old pieces and mixing up what you already have.

On a more specific note, I believe something is up with sleeves.  Stylistic changes in sleeves are only minimally reported and therefore, hardly make up a “trend” in the sense of a buzzed popularity.  But, come on, anyone of you would have been terrified of wearing puffed sleeves back in early 2000s!  Here are the sleeves I am digging from NY Fashion Week.

1. Puff sleeves with a modern twist, Fendi

2. Long, puff sleeves, Tadashi Shoji

3. Bell sleeves, Tracy Reese

4. Loose sleeves with cuffed ends, Preen

[more here: Altuzarra, Zac Posen]

One consistent pattern I display, whether at high school, college or in real life, is that I put way too many items on my plate.  While this gives me variety, I lack focus.

Today is a perfect example.  On a fine Saturday afternoon, I got dragged into a three-hour long meeting on human trafficking and during a moment of weakness, I gave them my word to help with grant-writing.  While I hold a full-time job, I am also supposed to be translating a project.  These commitments are in addition to other things I signed up for, like salsa and yoga, and my personal challenge to make ravioli and new friend #6 in the city.  This is how much I lack focus.  My CV is an assemblage of unrelated things and I mean, look at this blog. Even my blog lacks a focus – not environmental, not a food blog either, nor a feminist blog. It’s undefined.

Two nights in a row, I had a nightmare where I couldn’t get into any graduate school because my gpa and my  standardized test scores weren’t good enough.  Even in my nightmare, I was not sure whether it was the GRE, GMAT or LSAT that I screwed up.  I was wavering even in my worst dreams.

In the end, what I am trying to get at is how do people ever stay focused?  How should one specialize?

From Penn station, we took an LIRR train to Bay Shore, from which we took a four-dollar shuttle (it’s called David Brothers shuttle) to the Fire Island Ferry terminal. If you are going to two other beaches slightly further east on the same island (e.g. Fire Island Pines), take the train two more stations down and get off at Sayville station and take a different ferry. Remember to bring cash because cards may not be accepted in some places. You can buy tickets on the spot and don’t need to make reservations ahead of the time.

After a train and a ferry ride comes the beautiful island beach. The pier sits on the north side, along with ocean front dining establishments. On the south shore are the beach homes, life guards, sun-bathers and even some yogis.

The place I stayed is a cute, modest inn called Clegg’s Hotel, about six steps away from the ferry terminal. Come to think of it, owning a vacation inn on Ocean Beach would be such a great occupation for a retiree. The grandma version of me will make hangover breakfasts and serve them to the tourists there to escape Manhattan. All these blue walls and paintings of shells and small streets filled with walking tourists in the summer will be more than what anyone could ask for. Apparently, people live on Fire Island all year round. I do not want to imagine how desolate and lonely the island could get in the winter though.

My dear reader, happy late summer!

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Urban Outfitters, also known as the hipster fashion store, has a clothing line called Urban Renewal, marked with the all-too-familiar recycling symbol. The intent of this fashion line seems sincere – the department store claims it to be “vintage,” “recycled,” and “remade.”

However, not only does ‘urban renewal’ as a concept have hardly anything to do with recycling, but it is also laced with controversy. At its heart, ‘urban renewal’ sought to bring ideals of suburbia into the decaying urban cores with a hope to reignite economic activities. Many low-income neighborhoods, or slums, were outright removed to bring in highways and expressways into the city. Many things that Urban Outfitters’s target customers cherish, including the luxury to walk instead of driving around, would hardly be available if urban renewal projects had taken over. To see a flashy, sustainable-looking “Urban Renewal” banner off of a downtown Manhattan department store seems rather messed up, or just how the world should be, depending on your world view.

People need to buy clothes and love fashion aesthetics. Businesses like Urban Outfitters fulfill that role, including their brand management department, which bridges customers and the right products. This is how markets work and marketing is a great communication method. That’s why when there is the retro buzz in the fashion world, many stores have jumped in to add vintage-inspired clothing lines. Even Forever 21, which changes their merchandise swiftly and generously, has added Heritage 21, the section in the store with lights intentionally dimmed. Part of the marketing effort is to create an ambiance around an item for people don’t just buy products, they also want to buy the ‘lifestyle.’

Many customers of Urban Outfitters, me included, feel the same way when we buy their nature-inspired quilt or an old-looking wallet even though we also know that the products are brand new and perhaps made in some sweatshop in India (or sometimes even after hearing some fishy stories like this). I may have gone with the flow with other marketing campaigns, but the store should know better that these aren’t just a bunch of air-headed consumers. In the business of persuasion, the play of seemingly similar concepts may in fact cause confusion, which is already the case with ecological products with so many labels and certifications to sort through. I am all for business and establishment, but I may finally stop supporting Urban Outfitters after all.

His name is Jim and he came to my commencement.  When I first told him that I wanted to study architecture, he told me I am better suited for something else, and taught me modern world history.  Four years later, I graduated from college with political science. Yes, he is so spot on.

Like all other good old teachers, Jim likes to encourage and cheer on my work.  And like all human beings, I need to hear every once in a while that everything is going to be alright.  When I have been unemployed and homeless (from the virtue of graduating), he tells me that I am a go-getter and that I am enterprising.  Then, today, he adds that I will be “happily successful.”

Which gets me thinking.  This maybe just what I have wanted in life after all.  To be happily successful.

Success is hard to define and measure.  In conventional terms, success usually connotes a rather public facet and a solid product of tangible, material achievement that can be boiled down as a statement and measured with a yardstick.  Let nonprofits be an example.  For a nonprofit, this is where hard statistics comes in.  For survival, every organization needs to boost of facts and figures, like the number of mosquito nets that get distributed, or the number of participants in a healthy cooking workshop.

Then, there is a softer form of measuring success.  For social organizations, anecdotes do the trick.  Check out the picture of a credit borrower at Kiva.org website, or a heart-warming story of a happier underdog that Pisgah Legal Services tells to a grant-maker.  We need to assess something less official and more human.  For individuals, this maybe love, happiness, meaningful fellowships, trust, connection, company, you name it.

Wanting the best of both worlds may seem pretty straight-forward to some, but for others, it’s not at all obvious. Especially, when we are young and full of ambition. We want to advance ahead of our peers, even if they are friends.  At this point and time, we have not yet tasted the hard success, which is the focus of our life right now. Most of my friends have dreams of an executive – working for World Bank, getting promoted, taking up prestigious fellowships, eyeing on a large sum of money from an innovation, and making important allies.

At the same time, there is a vague sense of distance and distrust in some quarters.  Issues of intimacy maybe the most trite and therefore banal problem of our modern society.  Among my Burmese friends, it’s due to accredited wealth, in such a cash-strapped society with various material pressures.  They therefore tend to retract into families, which is not a bad thing in itself.  Some of these individuals may be socialites, with hundreds of followers and friends, but at a deeper level, they open up and entrust themselves only to a few family members.

Then, my American friends, with American guilt.  The United States has a large footprint in the world and the youths feel the shame.  The father may own a household name company that makes tools for cutting timber when the student specializes in a discipline that aims to prevent such acts.  I knew from growing up in Burma that poverty is difficult, but I hadn’t realized that being so privileged is not easy either.

In the end, when you don’t know who to trust, how much to open up and what to love, it’s also hard to be happy. People my age and folks I know seem to be on the right track to ‘success’ – the hard power, the tangible – but we are so lost on how to be balanced and happy.  That is not to say that I don’t know loving, trusting individuals that are also aggressively successful.  I mean, look at my lady friends Brianna, Rachel, Amy or Jessie!  It’s my belief that there is a way to protect myself and find my way up while being open to meaningful company and trusting relationships.  Like Jim says, I aspire to be ‘happily successful’ … not a happy but starving idealist, nor a confused, manipulative careerist.  Seeing Jim today was quite nice.

I must say I have a woman-crush on these bloggers.

1. Amber Mortensen’s Painfully Hip site at http://www.painfullyhip.com.  She once did a three-dollar outfit, but you would never have guessed.

2. Liebermalene Vintage at http://www.liebemarlene.com.

3. Street fashion at The Locals at http://thelocals.dk.

4. Ariel Maile Adkins at http://artfullyawear.blogspot.com. An art historian and a fashionista combined.

5. ?

One day, Jack took me to a cute Bavarian town called Helen near Atlanta, Georgia.  Its town-hood is only nominal.  In the place of residents, tourists roam around this nostalgic neighborhood during summer months, playing miniature golf, eating candies and ice-cream along the streets, and riding dorky, little buses.  If you decide to go there, make sure you bring a bathing suit to go tubing!

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Good company, bad company, they all go away.  We can only live in the moment and enjoy life.

Davidson alums are such wonderful people. The same goes for people like Elizabeth, Hana, Zach, Louise, and many more Elizabeths, Hanas, Zachs, and Louises.

Some already-established folks reply your email out of courtesy. But others…they really become your mentors. They buy you your drink while giving you advice. They let you crash at their apartments (in a bed, not even in a couch, which was what I anticipated). They write long emails to their previous bosses that will interview me. Or tell me that the organization that has just rejected me is weird and it’s for the better. Though we have never met outside, Elizabeth practically hunt down organizations that work with hers and pretty much sold my résumé to them.

Isn’t it amazing that people help complete strangers, making room in their already busy lives?