Road trip: Atlanta

Atlanta is great! We started the day with the best pancakes ever:

Corn on the left, sweet potato on the right

Then we went to the Center for Civil and Human Rights, which is a really cool interactive museum about the US civil rights movement historically and the global human rights movement today. The most intense part is when you sit at a model lunch counter wearing headphones, and listen to people screaming and jeering at you while your chair shakes and lurches as if it's being kicked. It's only three minutes long, but it's a very difficult three minutes. We didn't take any pictures in the museum, but here's a few shots of the outside, which is gorgeous:

Ben and the fountain

The museum itself

After that we drastically reversed course and went to the Coke museum. We posed with giant decorative Coke bottles:

And looked at small Coke bottles from around the world:

Why is Croatia wearing a tie?

Watched Coke being bottled:

Wondered what the heck this thing is:

Wondered if this memo about "Project Kansas" (aka New Coke) could possibly be real:

And sampled Coke products from around the world:

Lastly, in the section about Coke and sports, there was a triangle of Coke bottles featuring Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, which seemed appropriately symbolic:

We spent the night having great dinner with great friends, and tomorrow it's off to Jackson!

Road Trip: Charlotte

The last few weeks have been a bit nutty: two weeks ago we flew to San Francisco to look for housing, we went from SF straight to Boston for one last weekend there before we leave the East Coast, then we drove back to Philly by way of Connecticut to meet our friends' new baby (yay!), spent three days packing all our stuff before the movers came and took it all away, spent three more days sleeping on the floor and doing all the random last things we had to do before leaving Philly (while hanging out with my parents and sister, who were in town for a final visit, and trying to cram in as much time with our Littles as possible), went to a wedding, and then this Monday we took off! I also cried a lot the last few days, because I don't want to leave.

To try and ease the painfulness of leaving Philly for a place that we didn't want to live, we are making the move a vacation and spending three weeks driving to SF and stopping to visit friends in various places along the way. Here's the itinerary:

I know it seems pretty random - it was dictated by (1) places where we have friends we can stay with, and (2) trying to go to as many new places as possible. The first stop was Charlotte!

Char-what?

We went to the Harvey Gantt Center for African American Arts and Culture, which had some really cool art that you unfortunately couldn't take pictures of, and then we walked around downtown Charlotte (except they call it "uptown"), which also had cool art and you could take pictures:

A bear for some reason

A mosaic

We also ate a lot of great (mostly fried) food, played board games with the friend we were staying with, and generally had a great time. This morning we had breakfast at a really neat cafe before hitting the road, and now we are in Atlanta!

Ben at breakfast

Art art art

There was a big interactive art festival near us this week! Saint Gobain, which is a giant international company I've never heard of before, was apparently celebrating their 350th anniversary - they created four interactive art "pavilions" and took them on a world tour. Their North American stop was Philadelphia, since apparently it's where their headquarters on the continent are. It was pretty groovy looking:

The pavilions!

Lit up after the sun went down!

The lines were pretty long, so we only had time to go into two of the four pavilions - one had a groovy fog and laser show inside, and the other was a bunch of spinning platforms with big colorful walls:

Selfie on the spinning color thing!

Yay, art!

Philly Wedding Sampler

Yesterday was wedding number three of the season! Here's the corresponding sampler:

I really liked how the first wedding sampler I made this year turned out, so I basically repeated the theme here. This time the bride and groom are wearing t-shirts with their Alma mater's logos on them (Northwestern for him, Iowa for her), the top has Penn's seal (since that's where they met), the bottom has a mountain (since they love to hike and got engaged on a mountain), and they are joined by their two cats.

Un-crossed Stitch

We had another wedding this weekend, and for the first time ever I made a sampler that wasn't cross stitched. The couple had a really cute little doodle of themselves that served as a logo of sorts for their wedding (they had it on the website, all the stationary, etc...) - I wanted that to be what I made for them, but couldn't make it look good on a grid for cross stitching. I eventually gave up and tried my hand at a different type of embroidery, and think it turned out pretty cute:

The whole thing is only 4 inches in diameter.

Now I have a new tool in my needlepoint toolbelt, yay!

Doing Things: Putting my money where my mouth is

Money is power. White people stole resources, labor, and land from people of color to build the US before it was even the US, and in the intervening centuries there has been a continuous stream of policies, both official and unofficial, that maintain and strengthen the unequal distribution of wealth between white people and people of color (read The Case For Reparations if you need a refresher). That means white people have the most economic power in the US, and part of dismantling white privilege is acknowledging that reality and working to change it. It's good and important to learn more, as I've been working to do, but just learning and caring abstractly is pretty meaningless if I don't actually use my privilege to do something about it. I hear a lot of white people try to opt themselves out of this part of the work because their family wasn't here "when all that happened" and/or because they worked hard to get what they have, and I've already written about why that's not a "get out of white privilege free" card, so today I'm going to focus on what I'm trying to do with my money.

What I've been doing so far:

•  I set aside a certain percentage of my paycheck to give away. The percentage has changed over time as my paycheck and financial situation has changed, but my philosophy is that more disposable income = give more of it away. However, I don't believe in giving "to charity" - I try to give "in solidarity." Here's a great talk on the difference between the two concepts - the summary is that "charity" is for the people it claims to serve, while "solidarity" is with them. Charity is giving money to an organization that feeds the homeless, solidarity is giving money to an organization run by formerly homeless people that fights for policies to end homelessness. A lot of nonprofits are somewhere in the middle and are not purely one or the other, but in general I try to give to organizations run by the people impacted by the injustice they seek to address. Different people care about different issues, but here are the organizations that I have a recurring contribution set up for:
• First Nations Development Institute - a Native-run nonprofit that works towards Native economic empowerment through a combination of training, advocacy, and direct financial grants.
• Partners In Health - PIH's mission is to provide health care to the world's poor, but it does so by training local people and establishing self-sustaining community health centers, instead of just periodically parachuting in with medicine and foreign doctors. They also focus on addressing the conditions of poverty that impede health, since the best health care in the world isn't very helpful if you don't have access to things like food and clean water. It was founded by Paul Farmer, who is both a doctor and an anthropologist, and everyone should read his book.
• Black Girls Code - founded by a Black female electrical engineer, BGC introduces programming to young girls of color so they have access to the STEM professions that will allow them to be the tech innovators and leaders of the future.
• The Food Trust - though it has since expanded across the country, the Food Trust started in Philadelphia, where they continue to work with local communities to ensure access to healthy food in schools and neighborhoods that are often known as "food deserts." They've done lots of great stuff here, like working to make sure SNAP ("food stamps") can be used at farmers markets so SNAP users can access local, fresh produce.
• Lambda Legal - they use a combination of education, litigation, and public policy advocacy to work towards full civil rights for LGBTQ people and people with HIV.
• In addition to the organizations that I make regular contributions to, I also set aside money for more acute situations. Lately that means I've been contributing money to fundraisers for things like Michael Brown's family's legal costs (that campaign was funded so the link no longer works) and bail and legal support for Baltimore protestors. My job makes it hard for me to show up to protests as often as I would like, but it also means I can afford to contribute financially to support those who are able to be there in person.
• This is a small thing, but I try to prioritize which movies I pay to see in theaters and which movies I watch months later online for less money or for free. Specifically, I try to prioritize paying to see movies made by people of color and movies with people of color in leading roles, because I want those movies to make money so more movies like them get made. For example, this year I only had time to see one of the Oscar nominated movies in a theater, so I picked Selma. There have been a lot of studies showing that diverse movies make more money, so hopefully over time the profit motive will lead to more diverse media.
  

What I am committing to doing in the future:

• The biggest thing I want to get better about is being more purposeful about where I spend my money as a consumer. I already do a lot of the easy things and avoid spending money at companies who do particularly shitty stuff with their profits, e.g. Chik-Fil-A (even though I know every giant/successful company does at least some shitty stuff, and no one can avoid all of it). What is harder to do, though, is purposefully spend money at businesses run by people of color - because all of the issues I talked about up top make it harder for people of color to found businesses in the first place. Still, the internet has been great for this purpose - both because shopping online gives you access to a bigger variety of shopping options, and because there are websites that help you find POC-run businesses to patronize locally. I'm committing to doing my research when I need to buy things, hire people for services, etc... and, whenever possible, to choose an option run by people of color. One thing I am proud of about where I work is that when we have conferences, we purposefully patronize restaurants/catering companies run by people in the communities where we place teachers - so I want to hold myself to that same standard.
• We're moving to the Bay Area this summer for Ben's new job at google, and we both have mixed feelings about it - we are excited for Ben's job, but can't deny the destruction that tech-driven rapid gentrification has done to communities of color in the area. Not that gentrification doesn't happen in other cities too, or that there are cities we could move where we wouldn't be gentrifiers, but it has had particular speed and voraciousness in the Bay because of Silicon Valley - and now we are moving there and becoming part of it. We're trying to be really purposeful about planning how we will live there so we don't cause further harm, and as much as possible try to mitigate the harm that has already happened. This list and this list have been helpful starting points - in terms of finances, we are committing to spending our money at local, POC-owned businesses as much as possible, adding some SF-based organizations to the recurring contributions list, and not living in a place where previous occupants were evicted or foreclosed on because of increasing prices. Ben is also going to buy a transit pass even if he ends up taking the "google bus" to work, because we'll be living in a city and taking advantage of all the great stuff it has to offer, and that means we contribute to its public infrastructure even if we have the privilege of opting out.

First Sampler of Spring

We had our first wedding of the season yesterday! Here's what I made:

The bride and groom like hockey, so each of them is wearing a tshirt with their respective favorite team's logo on it (his is the Washington Capitals, hers is the New Jersey Devils), and he has checkerboard shoes because he likes ska. The torch at the bottom is the logo of Rowan University, which is where they met and got engaged, and at the top is an outline of New Jersey since that's where they live and where they got married. This was my first time making a circular pattern like this, and I am happy with how it turned out!