Saturday, November 29, 2008
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Monday, October 27, 2008
Friday, October 24, 2008
PS 165
PS 165 field trip to central park zoo
:)
:)
feeding the giant female goat
alexis loving the chips
saphire making a monkey face
ANGELICA !!! THE TINIEST LID
workin it
ernest, the love of my life
post lunch energy rush
sharing! :)
you just can't HANDLE this
Sunday, October 19, 2008
my sibs
My siblings are the shit. For real. Last weekend Robbie came to New York for the night. On Friday we hung out on campus (Robbie played frisbee while I showed off Isabelle), went shopping in Soho, met up with Dana for dinner, attended an ice cream social in Lerner Party Space, beat all my roomies in Scatta, and spent the rest of the night climbing on Alma Mater and playing simon says dance on the sun dial. Saturday we took an early morning trip to the Met, put some Nussy in our tums, played more frisbee, then hopped on a train back to Denville. Dad picked us up and we all went pumpkin picking then Robbie and I took an epic trip to Target. Sunday morning I watched him lose his hockey game and get really pissy.
Jay was in town from LA this weekend and stayed with me for two nights. Dana came up to Columbia and we went to every single bar, did jaeger bombs minus the bombs, and went to an EC party where I pretended to be Jamie Lynn Spears. Friday night they met me at work with Stina and Liz and we went down to R-Bar where Nais was with Blaise. It was a family fest like never before.
Robbie's really cool because he loves mini skateboards, has a blog, and knows how to gchat. He also would vote for Obama if he were old enough. And his hair is long.
Dana's a lot cooler than I am and everyone knows it. She makes really amazing tshirts and baked tofu. And she's my best friend.
Jay is so L.A. and complained about the "freezing" weather every five seconds. But he's also pretty cool. And he has some kick ass little siblings.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Manda gets serious
The following are some quotations from Bill McKibben's book "Deep Economy"
'The economist Richard Layard, in his pathbreaking book Happiness, lays out the matter almost as an equation. "Both income and companionship have declining marginal returns," he says. The evidence shows that "increases in income produce large hedonic gains in developing countries," small and variable gains in Europe, and, "at least over a fifty-year post-war period, negative gains in the United States." Community follows precisely the opposite pattern: increased companionship "yields more happiness in individualistic societies, where it is scarce, than in collectivist societies, where it is abundant." What this means is: if you are a poor person in China, you have plenty of friends and family around all the time; perhaps there are five people living in your room. Adding a sixth doesn't make you much happier. But adding enough money that all five of you can eat some meat from time to time pleases you greatly. By contrast, if you live in a suburban American home, buying another coffeemaker adds very little to your quantity of happiness--indeed, trying to figure out where to store it, or wondering whether you picked the perfect model, may decrease your total pleasure. But since you live two people to an acre, a new friend, a new connection, is a big deal indeed. We have a surplus of individualism and a deficit of companionship, and so the second becomes more valuable.'
...
'Of course, it's obvious to most of us that having friends is better than not; but the data show that for people in the rich world, having connections with others is much better than having more money....It's not so hard, then, to figure out why happiness has declined here even as wealth has grown.'
...
'When psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whose works on "flow" helped launch the study of human satisfaction, studied dozens of activites to see what actually made Americans happy, he found that volunteer work of all kinds generated "high levels of joy, exceeded only by dancing."...This sounds silly and soft-headed to some of us, but only because we've so internalized the economist's idea of the human being as a self-contained want-machine bent on "maximizing utility." Think about your own life: which moments mattered most?'
...
'The knowledge that you matter to others is a kind of security that no money can purchase.'
'The economist Richard Layard, in his pathbreaking book Happiness, lays out the matter almost as an equation. "Both income and companionship have declining marginal returns," he says. The evidence shows that "increases in income produce large hedonic gains in developing countries," small and variable gains in Europe, and, "at least over a fifty-year post-war period, negative gains in the United States." Community follows precisely the opposite pattern: increased companionship "yields more happiness in individualistic societies, where it is scarce, than in collectivist societies, where it is abundant." What this means is: if you are a poor person in China, you have plenty of friends and family around all the time; perhaps there are five people living in your room. Adding a sixth doesn't make you much happier. But adding enough money that all five of you can eat some meat from time to time pleases you greatly. By contrast, if you live in a suburban American home, buying another coffeemaker adds very little to your quantity of happiness--indeed, trying to figure out where to store it, or wondering whether you picked the perfect model, may decrease your total pleasure. But since you live two people to an acre, a new friend, a new connection, is a big deal indeed. We have a surplus of individualism and a deficit of companionship, and so the second becomes more valuable.'
...
'Of course, it's obvious to most of us that having friends is better than not; but the data show that for people in the rich world, having connections with others is much better than having more money....It's not so hard, then, to figure out why happiness has declined here even as wealth has grown.'
...
'When psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whose works on "flow" helped launch the study of human satisfaction, studied dozens of activites to see what actually made Americans happy, he found that volunteer work of all kinds generated "high levels of joy, exceeded only by dancing."...This sounds silly and soft-headed to some of us, but only because we've so internalized the economist's idea of the human being as a self-contained want-machine bent on "maximizing utility." Think about your own life: which moments mattered most?'
...
'The knowledge that you matter to others is a kind of security that no money can purchase.'
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