Better Things for the One Million Moms To Think About or They're Just Schweddy Balls, Baby!

So, for the past few days I've been laughing at the Schweddy Balls Ice Cream that Ben & Jerry's came out with.  Every time I think about it, or hear someone else talking and laughing about it or read about it, I laugh.  It's funny.  And the skit on SNL that birthed it is funny.  Good on ya, Ben & Jerry for having the balls, er, guts to have fun with this.

Then I read about the One Million Moms and their call for a boycott of Schweddy Balls.  In their words, Ben & Jerry introduced a  "...vulgar new flavor has  (that) turned something as innocent as ice cream into something repulsive. Not exactly what you want a child asking for at the supermarket."

Oh, boo hoo (and don't even get me started on their issue with Hubby Hubby flavor).  Seriously, this is what you spend your precious time on?  This is what you want to rally your the power of One Million Moms about? What a waste.  There are so many more important things that you could be doing, gettiing press about, creating solutions for.  And I'm not saying that these are mutually exclusive--I'm saying that there are many, many more issues that deserve your time and attention.  So many in fact that you could multi-task your little brains out and still not get to all of them.

So, because I hate to see such a waste of resources, I'm going to share a few ideas I came up with on my 10-minute drive home from work.

1.  Visit, clean up and put flowers on the 4,683 plus graves of the men and women that have given their lives in our current war(s).

2.  Collaborate on a solution for our horrifyingly broken Child Protective Services and Foster Care system.
(You know, according to NCMEC there is an estimated 800,000 kids that are reported missing each year and children missing from care fall into three groups; those who run away, those who are abducted and those whose whereabouts are unknown.)

3.  Give blood. (The Red Cross needs 1/2 a million blood donations in August/September to meet patient demands.)

4.  Work with local and federal governments to put a stop to the human trafficking of young boys and girls for the international sex trade.(Worldwide, it is estimated that somewhere between 700,000 and four million women, children and men are trafficked each year, and no region is unaffected and an estimated 14,500 to 17,500 women and children are trafficked into this country each year.)

5.  Talk to your children about why Schweddy Balls is so funny and then why you don't think it was a good idea.  Get their opinion on it.  It's called teaching your child "critical thinking" skills.

6.  Spend a few minutes thinking about some other mom's son, Troy Davis, and the issues with the death penalty in this country.

7.  Start and staff a voter registration drive with the goal of getting all eligible Americans ready and able to vote according to each states rules.

8.  Work with Skype to make their "Skype in the Classroom" vision of  a million connected classrooms a reality.

9.  Gather a million of anything (mosquito netting, childrens books, pennies) and do something with them.

10.  Go to http://www.avaaz.org/ and find one or two, or heck, maybe even three issues that your One Million Moms can make a real difference on.  A difference that makes a real impact on people's lives.

11. Go to http://www.kickstarter.com/ and help someone or a group of someones realize a dream.

I left myself a voicemail on the way home telling myself these 11 ideas for this post so I wouldn't forget them. Literally it was 10 minutes.  Which means that anyone else can spend 15 minutes and come up with 16 better ideas.

But it's not really about the ideas is it?  No, it's not.  It's about the fact that you have built an amazing resource and in this country you do have the freedom to do anything with that resource.  All I'm asking is that you think about the responsibility that comes with that freedom and be better than worrying about something as silly as Schweddy Balls.

Purposeful Writing: Mine and Others

I took an unintended break from writing this summer.  I thought it was because I have having a 'word' issue.  I was writing a lot for work.  I had started writing a lot on two book projects of my own.  And I was reading a lot of other people's words--books, articles, news stories, blogs, tweets, status updates...you name it, I was inhaling it.  And somewhere in all of this, it felt like I lost 'my voice'.  I sat down to write, but it all felt a bit strange. So I just stopped, thinking that the urge would return soon enough.

"Soon enough" turned into about 5 months.  I was getting an itch to write again, but not the usual obsessional pull towards the computer.  So I wandered around the book store and the internet and found that a favorite writer of mine, Kristin Cashore of Graceling fame, had a post on writer's block just last week. Three things I liked about her post.  First, she brought Philip Pullman into the discussion and I love his anti-precious attitude about it, especially when she quotes him as saying, "Plumbers don't get plumber's block...." which is both true and false (from a literal interpretation of their job) and made me giggle.  Anyway, so Mr. Pullman doesn't believe it exists.  Ms. Cashore breaks her thinking about it into two areas of feeling:  The whiny cop-out of the, "I don't wanna" feeling and harder to admit, yet more honest, "I literally just can't" feeling.  I definitely, after putting my own experience up against her definitions, fell into the "I literally just can't" camp. 

I, it turns out, needed a break.  Not because I was tired of writing. Just the opposite, actually. I loved the writing, but in retrospect, I believe I was tired of writing without Purpose.  Not in the little scheme of things--I had something to say every time I put fingers to keys.  But in the bigger scheme of things I needed to ask myself, "What is the gestalt or the collective take away from all of this?"  

Funnily enough, this is a question I ask myself everyday in terms of what I write at work, but I had yet to apply that same framework to my own personal work.  This really came clear to me after I fell into editor Dennis Cooper's Little House on the Bowery series.  These books are a complete left turn from what I usually read and yet I find I'm hooked mostly because I find that there is a larger theme or purpose behind all of them.  Matthew Stokoe focuses on the theme of following and failing the American Dream in his writing.  Cautionary tales to be sure, both Cows and his earlier High Life are both powerful statements about what drives us to want more and very hard reads. They are gritty and exhausting with a spare, almost throw-away brutality to them.  But they make you think, even though the more dainty of you might actually want to throw up here or there.  In Derek McCormack you find another dark author, but this is a funny, wry and surprisingly clever writer who looks at aspects of our culture through a vastly alternative lens--and, he wrote vampires before vampires were cool .  In both The Show that Smells and The Haunted Hillbilly Derek gives us an unvarnished, under the glitter look at Hank Williams, Coco Chanel and others.  

Now, obviously story tellers entertaining us while also creating consistent arguments about a culture or an idea/ideal is nothing new, it's just that these books were there for me when I was searching for an answer to a question I didn't know I had.  So I'm a bit indebted to them.

In terms of my own purpose when it comes to my writing, I'm dancing around an answer. I've got something that feels true and interesting, but I'm just rolling it around in the back of my head, testing it out so to speak.  So we'll see how it works itself out as I continue to write it all down and put it all out there.