Self Evident Truths

Happy Wednesday! I know I have been posting more TED talks recently, but they are just so good and I can't help myself! I just love how informative and personal they can be, and in less than 20 minutes, I am much more informed or inspired about a particular issue. I loved IO Tillett Wright's talk today about the concepts of gender, sexuality, marriage equality, and her project called Self Evident Truths. She is a photographer with a goal of taking pictures of anyone who identifies as not 100% straight because she believes that anyone who looks at these unadulterated and unedited photographs of real people puts a human face to equal rights movement. The name for the project, Self Evident Truths, comes directly from the Declaration of Independence from the quote "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Anyway, I strongly urge you to watch the TED talk, but if 18 minutes is too long for you, I included a less than 3 minute version below, so you can still get a great idea about the talk and the issue at hand.

Happy viewing! As always, feel free to leave comments!

Eve Ensler: "Love Your Tree"

This is perhaps one of the best clips on body image I have ever seen! Do you have 80 seconds? If so, watch!!

Eve Ensler is the playwright for the "Vagina Monologues" and advocates for women in many different ways! She is currently involved with V-DAY: A Global Movement to End Violence Against Women and Girls Worldwide. This looks like an awesome organization, so click here to learn more!

Have an excellent and empowered week!

Mango-Blueberry Swirl Smoothies

I love smoothies!! Always have, and always will! And putting mangoes and blueberries together in a smoothie? Yum!!

On Foodgawker (if you are not familiar with this website, it is one of my all time favorites and a great collection of food blogs and amazing recipes), I found this beautiful smoothie recipe from Perry's Plate blog. I thought they sounded delicious and looked gorgeous too! I changed the recipe a little by using milk instead of only juices, so that prevented them from "swirling" as much, but it was still delicious!

Blueberry smoothie:
1 cup blueberries
1/2 cup milk or juice (using juice will help them swirl better)
honey to sweeten (optional)

Mango smoothie:
1 mango
1/2 cup orange juice

Make the mango smoothie first by combining both ingredients in the blender. Pour into a separate glass or jar. Next, prepare the blueberry smoothie by combining those ingredients in a

blender and blending until smooth. Then, take both your mango smoothie and blueberry smoothie and pour them, simultaneously, in a glass, to try to create a swirled pattern. Serve and enjoy!!

Canoe Crossing: A Lunch with Vicente Diaz

Hello everyone, and happy weekend!! Today I had the amazing opportunity to eat lunch with Vincente Diaz, a professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois. This is the first talk I went to of the "Lunch On Us!" series of the semester, where the university brings awesome speakers from all disciplines, organizations, etc to discuss matters of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, any other social identity, or interesting topics. These events are hosted at various locations on campus and are typically a lot of fun! Vicente Diaz's talk discussed how canoes have historically served as links between Pacific Islanders and Native Peoples of the Great Lakes Region, and he is involved in a project that is trying to help revitalize this canoe culture.

Diaz revealed that the Pacific Islanders have been seafaring and traveling long distances 3,000 years before what we consider major explorers like Columbus or Magellan even left the shore. The Pacific is such a vast area (indicated by map below), that stretches from Hawaii, to New Zealand, to Easter Island. These seafaring people continuously traveled to other islands, and using the canoes were 100% powered by people, the wind, and the waves. He shared how the Pacific Islanders had specific chants they would use that were amazing mnemonic devices to aid with navigation, prior to the invention or use in this region of other navigation aids that are associated with the Western "Age of Exploration" throughout the 15th to 17th Centuries.

Why is this canoe culture important and need to be revitalized? Well, it could save lives. Due to global warming, many islands in the Pacific are going to be completely submerged, and therefore uninhabitable. The canoes could serve as the vessels necessary to move these people to other, larger islands for very little cost. Vincente Diaz and the University of Illinois recently received a grant to build one of these canoes that will be around 400 feet long and will seat 12. This initiative will be building the canoes out of a mix of wood and fiberglass, which will help make them lightweight as well as easier to mass produce. Another important component of the work that Diaz and others are doing is a project to create virtual canoeing simulations, that will help teach the native peoples and students from the University of Guam about how to build and operate these canoes, as well as how the history of the canoe is such an integral part of their history. These canoes are not your typical canoes, so it becomes important to teach people how to use them, since to change direction, the outriggers must be completely transferred to the other side of the boat in a short period of time. The boat has an outrigger, which is the part that extends off to the side of the boat, and it helps stabilize the boat without needing the hull of the boat to be as deep. Here is a picture that shows the outrigger, although it is not necessarily what the boats from this area look like.

For more information, check out this documentary Vincente Diaz made that is on Youtube. It is called Sacred Vessels and there are two parts! I have embedded part one below.

Enjoy your day!

Insecurity

Regardless of age, nationality, gender, or body type, I am sure that many of us have, throughout at least one point in our lives, felt insecure, and possibly wished we had someone else's body, talent, or even their life. My experience with this negative body image came from my freshman year of college, when I really struggled with my own body image and was comparing myself with other people.  The transition from being very active in track in high school to going to college caused me to gain much more weight than I was expecting, and I didn't handle it how I should of.  I never resorted to anything crazy, but my thoughts about my body weren't always in a happy place. I was just shocked, confused, and frustrated by the fact that despite my daily trip to the gym and eating pretty healthy, that I continued to put on the pounds, which for one length of time, was about a pound a week. I would step on the scale multiple times a day, yearning for that socially constructed powerful number to shrink.

Eventually, I realized that obsessing about how I looked was not healthy, and from that point I have developed a very positive body image.  I got rid of the scale, met many new people who became some of my closest friends, and realized how much there was to be happy about in my life, and that it was silly to focus so much on what the number on the scale said. I realize that I will never be able to fit in a tiny pair of jeans or anything like that, but I am healthy and there is so much more than size and appearance. And this experience is why I am so passionate about helping others to develop more positive self-esteems and body images. We all bring such unique talents and positive characteristics to the table, and are often our own toughest critic. It is tough, but we need to change the way we view ourselves, and learn to look for the positive, so we can see ourselves as the beautiful people we are! Also, perhaps the fact that so many people, even models, (as you will see from the amazing TED talk I included below) feel insecure can help us realize that there is no "ideal" body type or body type that is immune from the occasional negative thought.  Our society definitely makes it challenging for us to feel good about ourselves sometimes, but I want to urge you to believe in yourself and love who you see! I hope you enjoy the video, and if you are interested in reading more about body image, you can click here to read some of my other posts on body image and access other great videos and resources! As always, feel free to leave comments! :)

Not the Typical Father-Daughter Dance

This morning I saw an amazing TED talk that described how a community hosted a father-daughter dance in the prison to include all female students and facilitate unique and moving experiences for the fathers, daughters, and all others involved.

The decision to host this program came about when the school community planned to host an event and one student explained how she couldn't participate since her father was in jail. The group of girls then did some brainstorming, and thought to ask to host it at the prison. This TED talk does a much better job of telling this story, so I urge you to watch it and have included it below. 

Beyond having a very heartwarming message, it made me think about the importance of taking opportunities to celebrate father-daughter relationships. I think I remember how my elementary school had a father-daughter dance, but I don't think I would have understood the significance behind these events in the way that it provides an opportunity for young women and their fathers to celebrate their relationship. I know I feel very lucky to have a father who is always 100% supportive and caring, and just a wonderful person who works so hard for our family and loves both my sister and I and our mom very much. I think there are a lot of us who are very lucky to have these close bonds and received support while we were growing up, so this video can serve as a reminder to make sure we share with our fathers, mothers, or really anyone who supported us as we have grown up, how we feel about them and how appreciative we are! So, thank you dad! :) And for those who may not have had a strong relationship with their fathers, I feel like there doesn't have to be a point when it is too late, and these chances to build relationships should be taken. Anyway, those are just my thoughts, enjoy the video!

Green U Speakers: Debbie Raphael

For my second installment of speaker summaries from Green U...

I really found Debbie Raphael’s talk to be very interesting, and my conversation with her following the talk was very meaningful! She currently works for the California Department of Substance Control and described her role of getting involved with government. She considers her role to be that of a civil servant, rather than a politician. She initially came from a science background but wanted to make something happen, and she believes that government is the place for that.

Raphael also believes in the power of asking the right questions and with her work in regards to products that contain many chemicals,  she wants items to be produced in the safest way possible, rather than saying that something  is probably “safe enough”. She warns against the “seduction of appeasement”, or the danger of compromising and in the end, only having something that really isn’t any good. Her core value that she shared with us was to express vision in what we believe, and ended by saying that the world is run by those who show up.

I enjoyed my conversation with her as we discussed the plastic water bottle industry, and I learned how there are no regulations for bottled water, while there are regulations for tap water. When discussing the difficulties with waste and recycling, one comment she made that I wholeheartedly agree with is that we can’t shop our way out of this problem, and I think this message is valuable for such a consumerist society. We ended our conversation with Raphael with a discussion of something that she has done to get nearly every job she has ever had. She has asked employers and other individuals for “informational interviews”, in which she asks them not for a position, but for a half hour of their time. She asks them related and meaningful questions and always concludes the interview with the question “can you give me the names and contact information of three people who might be able to help me out or are doing work similar to what I have talked about, etc. It was very cool, and she was a sweetheart and told me that she would love to do this with me should I choose to ask her! This was just the first of many valuable interactions from Green U as I continue to talk about these speakers over the upcoming days!

If you missed the first post that contained more general information about the speakers or experience at Green U, click here!

Green U 2012 Speakers: Andy Ruben

Hello everyone! I hope you have had a lovely new year thus far! About a month ago, I attended Green University as a finalist for Project Green Challenge. On the first day of Green U, we all arrived, had eco makeovers, our photo shoot, and participated in the community dinner. It was such a great day and a truly spellbinding experience. However, the second day was really cool because we had the joy of listening to 15 different speakers who have all done amazing things in the realm of sustainability! I felt so inspired! It sort of felt like a TED conference, since each speaker was allowed to talk for about 10 minutes, and after each session, we were paired up with other finalists, so I was with Natalie, and we had the chance to talk one on one to nearly all of the speakers, which was perhaps the most meaningful part of the whole experience. Getting the chance to connect with someone who shared our passion but had valuable experiences and connections was so educational and inspirational! In this post, and in many others, I will highlight different speakers from Green U, and share a little bit about what they talked about.

The first speaker of the day was Andy Ruben, who is the founder of yerdle.com, an amazing site that is founded on the principle of collaborative consumption, or sharing of goods, so instead of each having all of our own products and sending them to a landfill when we are done with them, we can share with our friends and other people we know. An excellent point he made that stuck with me was that we often get caught up in excitement when a greener alternative of a certain product we use is created, but we still continue to consume that product, even when it doesn't really have to be necessary. A specific example of this that he used in his presentation was a new type of plastic fork that has a hollow middle part, which means it has 13% less plastic than it's conventional counterparts. While this is truly a step in the right direction in the plastic fork world, isn't a much better alternative to just stop using plastic forks?

He also addressed how, while he was initially working for sustainability at Walmart, he found it was very easy for people to tear the company or certain initiatives down, but much more difficult for them to  take action. It was an interesting place to be in since Walmart is such a big corporation, and he said it was tough for him to think if it was a fundamentally good or bad company. Finally, Ruben described that he loves the start-up world and the process of innovation, which is what led him to help create Yerdle, since 80% of the stuff in the average house is used just once a month. Another cool resource I discovered from Ruben's presentation was AIRBNB, which is an alternative to the traditional hotel experience by using places that already exist, such as people's spare rooms in their homes or apartments.

I hope to continue posting more about the speakers in the upcoming days. You can see more information and photos about all of the speakers here.

Also, if you want to read more about the other finalists or watch their presentation videos, click here.

Easy Butternut Squash Soup

On cold winter days, I always find myself craving warm and yummy food, so a butternut squash soup was a great decision for some wholesome food to warm up with! This recipe wasn't really modeled after anything, and basically used what we had on hand in the kitchen, but it is very healthy and simple to make. It is also more of a savory soup that a sweeter soup, since I used flavors such as onion and garlic instead of cinnamon, etc. Also, this soup is more on the chunky side, but it could have very easily been blended to achieve a smoother consistency.

Serves 3-4:
Ingredients:
1/2 onion
3 cloves of garlic
olive oil
2 cups vegetable broth
half of a butternut squash
seasoning
splash of milk

Ahead of time, you can roast your butternut squash at 400 degrees Fahrenheit in a pan, sliced in half and laying face down in a little bit of water. It will need to roast for about an hour, but you can't really overcook it. It will get very soft and be extremely easy to work with. You can use a lot of it for the soup and even make other recipes with the extra if you desire!

To begin preparing your soup, dice the onion and chop the garlic. Heat some olive oil in a pot and sauté the diced onion and chopped garlic on low heat. If you want to expedite the garlic cooking process, you can even microwave the chopped garlic in a little olive oil for about a minute prior to adding it to the pot.

Next, add your butternut squash, the vegetable broth, and your seasoning and turn it up to medium heat.  Let it simmer, stirring periodically, until everything is heated through.

Turn off the heat, wait a couple minutes, and then add your splash of milk (mine was sort of a large splash haha), and mix it in. Serve, enjoy, and be cozy!!

Almost happy Friday!