juliacsmith

Jun 05 2013

Links for the beginning of June

A hodgepodge of links that’ve caught my eye.

Help my favorite NC chefs:

Longtime readers of this blog know how much I adored my visit to stone circles at The Stone House, a retreat space (and so much more) in Mebane, NC. When I rave about my experience there, the food is always front and center. I even had the chance to serve as a recipe tester for their forthcoming cookbook!

a couple of dishes

Now my friends there are down to the wire, with just 37 hours left in their fundraising campaign to build a new, state-of-the-art kitchen. As my friend Heidi eloquently put it:

The kitchen, as it exists, has nourished my body, spirit, mind and heart. If that matters to you, give, even $1. The kitchen as it WILL exist will be able to do that for SO many more people. I know there are a lot of places to put your money, please consider this a GREAT one. Thanks!

Here’s the link to their indiegogo campaign. Thanks for considering this!

tomatoes

Speaking of food…

Things I did not eat in Boston this weekend but have enjoyed in the past:

Anything at Myers + Chang (spicy beef! Five-spice chocolate mousse!). Everything I ever tried at Sofra. Ditto Clear Flour. And Toscanini’s.

Thing I did not eat in Boston but will seek out in the future:

Banana breakfast sandwich at Mike and Patty’s, on Lisa J’s recommendation.

Thing you should do sometime if you find yourself in Salem, Massachusetts:

Peabody Essex Museum. If marriage is your thing, you could also make like my friends Erika and Nick and have a really spectacular wedding there.

But back in Chicago…

I recently received tickets to By the Way, Meet Vera Stark at the Goodman, and liked it so much. You know the drill: if you see it, please tell me so we can debrief.
I worked from this space recently. This Yelp review is on point.

Other things happening soon in cities I love:

NYC, June 30 – Cathy‘s big reveal of The Love Letters Project
Los Angeles, all month – my sister’s Fringe debut in a funny musical

Other lists of links, if this is your jam:

TheLi.st archives
Dining and Opining’s May Link Favorites

Request for links:

What is the best piece you’ve read, or thing you’ve seen, about what’s going down in Turkey?

Thanks for reading! I’d serve you all a slice of stone circles fig cheesecake if I could.
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All photos were taken at stone circles in August 2011.

Tagged Boston, chicago, fundraising, LA, Los Angeles, NYC, stone circles at The Stone House

May 28 2013

2 Comments

Community, Food and Drink, Required Reading

Links for a short week

Reads:

Is PTSD Contagious?, Mac McClelland/Mother Jones

9-year-old Chicago activist saves school, dreams big, Meredith Clark/MSNBC; watch the quick segment from yesterday’s Melissa Harris-Perry show

The Gay Guide to Wedded Bliss, Liza Mundy/The Atlantic

America’s Most Colorful Congresswoman: Kyrsten Sinema, Ann Friedman/Elle

Cleared of charges after explosion, Florida teen gets full scholarship to space academy, Jen Hayden/Daily Kos; if you weren’t following this story, read this first

Eats:

For a cookout, I endorse these Sesame Noodles—which I made without the Szechuan peppercorns because we didn’t have them—and amarula dom pedros (or just pour amarula on vanilla ice cream).

Also, Indian-style corn on the cob: Go to an Indian grocery store. Buy one small box of Kashmiri Mirch red chili powder and another of Chunky Chat masala. When BBQ day rolls around, grill your corn, cut up some lemons, and put out plates of salt, masala, and chili powder. Have everyone dip a piece of lemon in each of the seasonings, then rub the spicy lemon all over the corn. Feel alive at the slight burning sensation on your lips and enjoy the best sweet-salty-sour combo ever.

Similar corn (with Yum’s family years ago)

Adventures:

I’m seeing Beth Urech’s one-woman show ActYourAge! at Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art here in Chicago the weekend after next. Wanna come? Her tagline is “sixty minutes with a 72-year-old” so the answer is automatically yes. (Full disclosure: Beth has hired me to help promote these performances.)

June 29, the amazing Gloria of Next Big Thing is hosting a big ol’ Chicago scavenger hunt.

In LA? My sister is making her Los Angeles Fringe debut in the upcoming The Real Housekeepers of Studio City, “an original one-act musical guaranteed to make you tap your toes (and tap into your TV nostalgia!),” June 9-28 at Theatre Asylum.

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Have a great week! What are you reading/eating/doing that I should try, too?

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Photo: Fourth of July 2009 because I barely picked up the camera this weekend. New summer goal: take five pictures I love before Labor Day. And I can’t just love them because they include people I love.

Tagged BBQ, chicago, LA, LGBT, Memorial Day, PTSD, recipes, theater

May 18 2013

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Community, Food and Drink, Required Reading

Link hodgepodge: Recipes, teachers, Mindy, and more

I brought you these.

Some things that caught my eye recently, in no particular order:

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From How to Be a Good Ally (Colorlines):

“’The job of a good ally is not to save anybody but rather to help create the conditions under which people can assert and grow their own power,’ said Rinku Sen, President and Executive Director of The Applied Research Center.”

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From What are you here to teach? (Tara Sophia Mohr):

Tara: I have a dream to teach x. How do I know if I’m ready, qualified, to teach that subject?

Jen: You are never ready. Ready comes from teaching, from being in the transformational conversation itself, from being a humble teacher/student–so skip asking if you are ready to teach. It’s not a useful question.

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Recipes I endorse:

With all of the fixins (in my case, Sriracha, lemon, and feta), I couldn’t stop eating this stuff.
In good times, in bad times, these salted peanut butter cookies will be by my side forevermore. I’ve made them several times and while they’re excellent as written, I can attest that all-purpose flour is fine; regular chocolate chips are fine; a mix of natural peanut butter and more processed stuff works out fine. I always freeze the batter before baking and watch my oven starting at about the 11 minute mark.
This salad is extremely delicious. And while I completely love and endorse farmers’ markets and would love to live a full-on locavore diet…I do not live in the LA paradise this blogger does. It’s still attention-grabbing with produce fetched at a Midwestern grocery store.

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Two takes on The Mindy Project as the first season wraps: one Crunk Feminist eeshap says she won’t watch the show anymore; Rachel Sklar offers a more Pollyanna take.

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In Chicago and itching for some escapism?

I almost couldn’t stand up after Head of Passes at Steppenwolf. Beautiful performances, beautiful design and direction, big questions about faith.
Thanks to some generous friends, I finally saw The Book of Mormon. My experience: laugh hard; hope we were all laughing for the same reasons; worry that was not true; repeat. Would love to debrief with anyone who’s seen it.
The 2013 Dionysus Cup Festival of New Plays is happening this weekend and next. If you like seeing new plays while they’re in development and participating in the democratic process, this is a steal. See one staged reading and enjoy a talk-back with the playwright and cast and know that your feedback might actually shape a new play. Or see two or more readings—an unlimited pass is just $10—and you can vote for your favorite to win the Cup (and cross your fingers that Polarity Ensemble Theatre might mount a full production).
In April I performed at the Park West (what?!). You can too! Last info session for the next Fear Experiment is next week. You can be a stepping or a cappella star. No, really, you can.

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Coolest job spotted this week: Rookie is hiring a full-time editor.

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This link roundup owes love to The Ann Friedman Weekly and Saya Hillman’s Smatterings, both of which I relish on the regular. Should I do more of these?

Photo above: Bouquet from Saipua in Brooklyn, spring 2011, 35mm.

Tagged chicago, media criticism, owning it, recipes, social justice, teaching, The Mindy Project, theater

May 16 2013

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Required Reading

We are saying thank you

Thanks
by W.S. Merwin

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

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Photo: Jan. 2010

Tagged friends, gratitude, poetry, W. S. Merwin

Mar 27 2013

8 Comments

Community, Revolution

Some thoughts about weddings

Wedding rings by Rebecca Zemans.

Like many of you, I woke up yesterday morning to find my Facebook news feed a sea of red equal signs. By 9 a.m., 26 friends had changed their profile picture to the tweaked Human Rights Campaign logo to show their support for marriage equality as the Supreme Court began hearing oral arguments; I can’t justify the time it would take now to calculate how many times that number has multiplied.

I also woke up to a notification in my inbox: “You’ve been tagged in five photos.” I knew without clicking that the images would feature me in one of two outfits: a spangly red-and-gold Gujurati lengha, or a short white dress with an illusion neckline and scalloped hem. Yes, I just got married.

[Privilege check #1: I was able to do this in the first place, legally and financially.]

And now the incredibly loving people who witnessed it aren’t hesitating to share photos online.

[Privilege check #2: Having photos of us and our wedding tagged online poses no threat to our jobs or safety.]

All this love-for-love on Facebook is jumbled up in my head, along with:

the inevitable and innumerable parodies of and twists on the red equal sign (see Anna’s roundup)
a few friends’ “assimilation does not equal liberation!” posts, this Beyond Gay Marriage post published on UrbanHabitat in 2010, and these resources, filed under “Marriage is the Wrong Goal“
various things I’ve read about the HRC, including this recent “Friend or Foe?” post on The L Stop and this older one from TransGriot called “Why the Transgender Community Hates the HRC”
and, in a way, with the loss of a dear friend this past weekend, a true civil rights leader who would have had far more eloquent things to say about SCOTUS and marriage than I do.

What follows is an attempt to untangle some of my thoughts. It might belong in my journal instead of online. But if you make it through, I would love to hear what you think and to know what else you’ve been reading that might help me make sense of things and be a good advocate and activist and ally – who happens to be married now.

Continue reading →

Tagged marriage equality, spaces, weddings

Mar 07 2013

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Community, People

Silver and gold friends

I went to a wedding in Florida last weekend. Today when my client asked how the trip went, I said, “It’s nice to realize that if you met your college friends all over again more than a decade later, you would still want to be friends with them.”

That was…measured. If I met my college friends today I would have ENORMOUS friend crushes on them. I might even be so intimidated—by their smarts, by their style, certainly by the geographic distance between most of us—that I’d never act on it. Thank goodness we met more than a decade ago!

A couple of weeks ago I started corresponding with a pen pal at a local elementary school. She wrote the questions below in italics. Underneath them are my answers tonight when I think about my college people:

Do you like your best friend because I do and her name is Myeasha?

Yes, I do. Like Beyonce, “I need my sisters.”

best friends do a lot for you like mines. She gives me very good edv-

ice.What about your best friend what does she or he do for you?

Here are some things my college friends did for each other this weekend: Ndidi drove her rental car to the airport and waited outside for an hour to spare me and Cristina an expensive late-night cab ride. Several of us shuffled hotel plans at the last minute (and some people paid more than they’d originally planned) so we could all have beds to ourselves. Zahra got the entire wedding crowd to sing “My Girl” to the bride in a tribute to the memory of a late-night diner singalong of yesteryear, then sneakily distributed a bunch of band-aids to those of us who went to school in St. Louis so they could be whipped out and affixed to our faces when Nelly came on. Annasara and I helped each other justify a LOT of those warm Doubletree cookies from the front desk. And when the groom’s vows acknowledged what a talented, multifaceted, calming, smart partner he’s got, that’s when the waterworks started, if they hadn’t already. “He sees what we see!,” our hearts and eyes said.

I feel conflicted linking to an Onion article in light of the last few weeks, but a few years ago there was one called Female Friends Spend Raucous Night Validating the Living Shit Out of Each Other. That’s what these people do for me and for each other, Pen Pal. But not in an insincere way.

many people become your friend very fast don’t you think so?

Well, not exactly, not as I get older. I look at my Grandma, still making new friends everywhere she goes, and I see the possibility for this to be true – especially when you live in close proximity to people with whom you have things in common and you’re guaranteed to run into them a lot. But as we move around and commit to jobs and/or partners and/or other things; as we devote some of our downtime to video chats with old friends; as we rely on Facebook more than we write letters or make phone calls, I wouldn’t say that my friends and I are making a lot of new, true, deep friends very fast. (This is part of why I’m participating in Fear Experiment here in Chicago: to meet new people and hopefully cultivate a stronger community in my new-ish home. And that’s how I met you!)

In college, I went to hear the author Anita Diamant speak about her work. Someone asked her a question about female friendships and the influence they have on her writing. She talked about her own relationships with people of different ages and said something to the effect of, “Old friends are important because they remind you of where you come from and who you’ve been. And new friends are important because they remind you that it takes work to trust and to be trusted.” So I know we will make new friends, that we need to lean into the process of it rather than rushing, and that these new friends will make us laugh and teach us things about who we are now. And at the same time, I’m so grateful for technology and life milestones and the memories that keep me in touch with my old friends.

Pen Pal, I hope you and Myeasha stay friends forever. And I hope someday I can share this post with you so you see what you inspired! Maybe we’ll even become real-life friends.

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Photo: Graduation day archives.

Tagged beyonce, community, friendship, personal

Feb 25 2013

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Community, People, Required Reading, Revolution

Quick links that help me feel a little more optimistic about the world

Oscar Night leave a bad (Oniony) taste in your mouth? Read, tweet, favorite, and share the Crunk Feminists’ Love Letter to Quvenzhané Wallis.

Want to write a love letter yourself? Check out The Love Letters Project, spearheaded by the luminous Cathy Wasserman.

And speaking of love letters, this article Trish wrote is a loving ode to (many more than) four inspiring people: A Field Guide for Recognizing Millennial Leadership.

Mulled these over and still feeling down? Consider Hannah’s tips for upping your “happiness set point.”

Or, on a very different note, read How to Bring Back the Dead, a beautiful piece my friend Timothy Colman wrote for his dad, and feel grateful for the people you love.

Thanks for supporting my friends (2, 3, 4, and 5 above) and some media-makers I admire (1, 2, 3, 4, and 5).

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Photo: Baltimore, MD, Nov. 2012

Jan 23 2013

2 Comments

Projects

What I’ve been up to

The other day my friend Emily posted this to Facebook:

“Shared is better than perfect.” – Lisa Silverberg

Right on. In that spirit, here’s a quick, imperfect roundup of some of the things that’ve been keeping me busy in these early days of 2013:

I signed a yearlong contract with NTEN. Over the coming year, I will explore the ergonomic pros and cons of my “home office” furniture (aka the couch vs. the dining room table), enjoy my walk-down-the-hallway “commute,” and learn a LOT while I support the Nonprofit Technology Network’s Communities of Practice and Communities of Impact programs. My official title is Community Project Manager. It’s not-quite-full-time, which is perfect because it’s meant…

I’ve continued freelancing as a writer, editor, and workshop facilitator. I helped some organizations write year-end fundraising appeals; researched and drafted an original article for another; and most recently, I designed two workshops—one on leadership, one on purposeful career paths—and traveled to a conference in Berkeley, CA to facilitate them for 50+ energetic college students and recent alums.

I owe huge thanks to my friend Annie Lumerman of Generate Change for connecting me to that last opportunity. Putting the workshops together was a really fun excuse to both revisit some of my “old standby” resources (like the Idealist Guide to Nonprofit Careers and the Bonner Network training templates and the New Organizing Institute toolbox) and also test out some new ideas – in one session, I had a mini FailFaire and several students got up to share their “fails” with bravery and humor! And speaking of bravery and humor…

I’m learning how to do barrel rolls, y’all! Two nights a week I am stretching and laughing and attempting to dance with a bunch of other self-described “non-dancers” as part of Fear Experiment. If you’re in Chicago, you can come witness our public performance one night only; click here and scroll all the way down to buy tickets.

Of course, a lot of other things have been happening, from the light (including attending a live taping of Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me) to the very heavy and sad (some people I love have been grieving sudden, terrible deaths of people they loved). And of course there are a lot of hanging threads from 2012 that I want to tie up – including imperfect, unfinished blog posts with more Copenhagen wedding photos, more Sandy relief opportunities, and just…more.

But two of my friends and I got together right after New Year’s to make vision boards, and I’m finding that that single afternoon of reflection and collage-making with them helped me to feel grounded and as prepared as I can be in the middle of all of these events and intentions. Sharing is better than perfect indeed.

I hope you all are feeling optimistic about 2013, or at least fired up and ready to go. Let me know if you want to collaborate on anything.

Tagged chicago, consulting, facilitation, Fear Experiment, freelancing, nonprofits, reflection

Dec 25 2012

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Community

The silent stars

Tonight I went to hear three of my little cousins sing with their church choir. I liked the benediction, the message offered by the pastor at the end of the service. “It seems that every year, our wish as we go forth from this service is for peace,” he said. “Peace in Syria. Peace in Jerusalem. Peace in Kabul.” He named many more countries and cities, stopping after “Peace in Newtown, Connecticut. Peace in Washington, DC.”

“The deep peace of the silent stars to you,” he said. “The deep peace of the rolling waves to you.”

And to all of you.

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Photo: Deep Creek Lake, MD, July 2010, with thanks to my super sparkler-wielding cousins.