Lauren Eames, Live from New York. UNPLUGGED.

I am lucky enough to go to a school that leases its students laptops. Under normal circumstances, my blog posts are typed from that laptop. This post is not one of them.  Unfortunately, as a result of severe technical difficulties (I think I can safely put severe in italics when the tech department says "your hard drive sounds like an off-balance washing machine") I have left my laptop with the geniuses of the tech department overnight, and it will quite possibly have to remain there throughout the day today. Why do I tell you this? Because what I do with my time without technology is rather interesting.

Because of the way many of my classes are structured (i.e. around the assumption that the students will have laptops) I was able to get very little of my school work done. I think it is only when you are forced to take a night off that you realize just how much school governs your life as a student. My plan to be awake at 10:00 PM to begin tracking Jupiter for my physics class was stymied not only by the cloud cover over my house but also by the fact that I simply didn't have enough work to keep me up that late. I am now 90% certain that my sleep patterns are dictated by my school work.

I think I have also lost sight of how strongly connected I am to the rest of the world by the internet.  I spend a good amount of my time home alone, and one of the ways I keep myself sane (other than by listening to podcasts) is by surfing the various social networking sites on which I have accounts. Not possible without a laptop. The 3G around my house is spotty to be complimentary, so many of the smart functions of my smart phone (on which I am typing this post) are disabled simply by location. In the words of The Eagles, "On quiet nights, this big old house gets lonely." Getting in touch with people with whom you don't really want to have a full conversation is somewhat difficult in this day and age. Of course I think the idea that you'd want to know what's going on in the life of someone with whom you wouldn't want to have a full conversation is an invention of this day and age, but I still find my self somewhat perturbed by the fact that I can't do it.

Now, many of you, I'm sure, will note my comment that this post was written on my smart phone and think to yourselves: "She isn't really unplugged!" Since I can't restrain my snark reflex, I will point you to the note that follows regarding the strength of coverage near my house; but you are right, dear hypothetical reader. I think it is honestly impossible to get completely unplugged in 21st century America short of becoming a mountain hermit in Appalachia. I am involved in a program at my school called "Global Scholars" that seeks to incorporate technology into my life to an even greater extent (it is for this program that I blog) as part of an initiative to turn GA students into better global citizens. However, the point I really wish to make is this: to all the bloggers out there who tout the virtues of getting "unplugged", firstly, it's damn hard; and secondly, why would you want to willingly cut yourself off from such an integral part of global life? Very few young people of the late 19th century would have proposed cutting themselves off from the telegraph and mass transportation systems (the things that turned their local worlds into national arenas), yet some twenty-somethings today propose to cut themselves off from the Internet, which - while it may be our lord and master to a certain extent - had made our national arenas into one, real-time global stage. I can't imagine not being connected any more, and, to the people who think real-time connectivity is too mainstream, wake up, smell the Internet, and imagine your life without it.

Yeah, I thought so.

My Half of the Sky

For those of you reading who don't already know this, I am cynical, white, prep school girl.  It's really hard for me to have it better in life.  I am from the North East of the United States and I go to school in Greenwich, CT.  I am lucky as hell.  As much as I hate the phrase (which you will know if you spend any time reading my rants), I was pretty much born an "empowered woman".  It is rare that any speaker can bring global issues home for me.  That just happened.

Nicholas Kristof is a New York Times columnist and the author of Half the Sky.  He's awesome as hell.  He works against human trafficking and to support women across the globe.  That's a gross understatement considering I just had the opportunity to listen to him talk about his mission for an hour; but you don't have all day to read, and I don't have all day to talk about this man's work.  The basic thesis of his work is that women across the globe are the key to, if not solving, ameliorating many of the world's issues.  Specifically, educating women is the key to working toward solving the vast majority of our global issues.  It's not the end all be all of fixing the world, mind you, but it can do a lot.  Education for women reduces birth rates, reduces the risk of contracting AIDS and other STDs, helps add sources of income to impoverished families, improves global health across the board, and improves the living conditions of communities as a whole, among other things.  Admittedly, making this happen does kind of involve throwing money at the problem; but another big point Kristof had to make was that raising awareness is key.  That's why he advocates for travel.  He calls for all of us to travel to places that take us out of our comfort zones (not necessarily to places like Darfur and Cambodia, it could be to a prison in your area).  I really think he's doing great work, and I applaud him for it.

And now I get to criticise, because, as y'all know, I can't be entirely positive on everything.  Firstly, I question the tone of his exhortation to the GA student body to travel alone. To places in which we are out of our comfort zones.  As women.  Alone.  I think that's both a little dangerous and also not quite the right way to travel.  Travel gets fun when you have people with which to share it.  Secondly, and this is more about my school (which I love to criticise) than about the speech itself.  Apparently, because we are an all girls school, we are contributing to the education of women globally in an impactful way.  Go back up to the first paragraph of this post where I talk about myself.  I'll wait.  Have you reread that? Good.  Now can you please explain to me how our school, in our community is doing anything for the area immediately around us.  I respect stuff like the faculty beard growing competition (its pretty awesome and its actually happening) which is raising money by encouraging us to donate for the privilege of deciding how the faculty members participating will shave at the end of February, but I honestly don't think that we can do much to incorporate the idea that "the enfranchisement of women is the key moral quandary of the 21st century" or the idea that "women aren't part of the problem; they're part of the solution" into our message. Our headmistress talks about incorporating these messages by making our buzz word of the year "Citizenship" and by (and this is not a joke) posting Kristof quotes in our hallways.  Apparently, by virtue of being an all girls school, we support Kristof's message in our community by existing.  I am a fan of education, but I don't think that simply by existing Greenwich Academy is doing much.

So, all that said, what do you think of Kristof, his work and his message?

New Year's Resolutions

This is a post that comes five days late, but do you really expect any better of me?

I am normally not one for New Year's Resolutions.  The "loose weight/get in better shape" resolutions fall by the wayside all to quickly.  The "spend more time with family and friends" resolutions are not applicable to me.  I have no substances to eliminate forever from my life (I have excellent relationships with sugar and coffee).  I have no debt to retire.  I really do enjoy my life; I need not resolve to do that.  As I am still in high school, I learn new things every day.  And I really am an organized person in spite of the appearance of my desk (cut me some slack; midterms are coming up).  These, the most common resolutions, have no relevance to my life.

However, the topic has been on my mind recently.  A friend recently shot me an email asking me a few questions about my habits regarding New Year's Resolutions for the Greenwich Academy Press (our school newspaper); and I have been considering the prospect of resolving something since I received that email.  For that reason I have resolved something!


This year, I will be posting a new piece of writing for every day.  That doesn't necessarily mean that I will have a new piece up every day (I'm failing miserably at that already).  There will be, by the end of next year, 365 pieces of writing on a blog.  Not this one. I will conveniently link to this new blog on the right sidebar as soon as I have set it up in order to avoid cluttering up this blog.

It all feels so official now, having written it out.  People of the Internet, I am committed.  This shall occur. And now for the requisite New Year's Question: have y'all resolved anything?  Talk to me in the comments.  It makes me feel cool.

Why I No Longer Need to be Told to Be an Empowered Woman

Yesterday morning the president of The White House Project came to talk to my school.  Before I get in to talking about the actual assembly, disclaimers need to be made...

• I am not anti-woman, but I am by no means a feminist.  
• I have seen way too many of these "be an empowered woman" assemblies for them to make me feel anything but cynical.
• I think this project does great work for women who need it.  The girls of Greenwich Academy do not need it.

Disclaimers accepted?  Good.  Let's move on. (profanity exists on occasion below)

I take serious issue with listening to women talk to girls about being empowered when they grow up.  Not only does it presuppose that we need empowering, but I really feel like it also, in a reverse psychology kind of way, tells us that we need to fight.  I believe in equality for everyone (in the modern era, I interpret "All men are created equal" to mean all people), but I am really tired of hearing that I need to be a conniving bitch to get that equality (and that the equality needs getting in the first place).  Additionally, I'm tired of being told that the only way for me to show that I am an empowered woman is for me to run for office or be in a position of leadership in the workplace.  I respect our speaker yesterday for mentioning that we need more women in academia, but I still feel like these speeches force me into visible positions in the world.  There is nothing wrong with being a stay-at-home mom, in fact it's incredibly difficult to be a mother.  I resent the fact that we are told that being a stay-at-home mom isn't good enough.  On the flip side, I remember a few years ago I saw a dance project about mothers.  The thesis of the project was that mothers can be anything but that "anything" was defined as various kinds of home makers.  That I don't agree with.

All in all I respect the message of the assembly: don't just say, do.  The White House Project proposes to bring women out from behind the scenes into the foreground.  I totally respect that.  However, I had a question about Ms. Dufu's anti-lobbying message.  She says that we shouldn't lobby for our rights, we should get ourselves elected so that we can get done what needs to get done on our political agendas.  So I ask her this:

• Have you ever run for anything?

Exactly.

(Communist) Party Rock Anthem

I believe it is an accepted fact that nothing productive is accomplished on the last day of a MUN conference.  And if it isn't it should be.

Sunday marked the last day of PMUNC 2011, and the Politburo of the USSR marked it well with an execution, an invasion, superlatives, dirty MUN puns, and "In Soviet Russia..." jokes.  Comrade Voroshilov was accused of and promptly executed for: "shaving off the wise, glorious facial hair of Comrade Stalin while he was in a wise, glorious, illustrious, and patriotic drunken stupor; telling the entire Leningrad district that he does in fact feel pretty; conspiring to slowly poison the committee with the sound of his voice; defacing the body of glorious Comrade Lenin in unspeakable ways; and replacing all the signs in the Moscow District that say CCCP with a crudely drawn CCCPenis".  We invaded ECOFIN and brought the same charges against them.  Superlatives were granted for "Most Likely to Go to Jail", "Most Likely to Be an Informant" (all of us; we're soviets), "Best Facial Hair", "Best Actual Communist", and "Best James Franco Look Alike".  To assuage your concerns, none of these were granted to me personally, but we all had a good time laughing about what a great time we had.  But my favorite part of Sunday was definitely the dirty MUN puns.  One of my friends has an axiom, "All jocks think about is sports; all nerds think about is sex" and no where is that more evident than at a Model UN Conference.  Admittedly, parliamentary procedure lends itself to dirty puns ("Motion to table the chair" or anything involving the word "caucus"), but what surprised me the first time I went to a MUN conference was how easily the United Nations itself lends itself to dirty jokes ("For a third world country, you're awfully developed" or anything involving the country "Djibouti").  Long story short, Model UN is awesome.

But on a serious note, I think Model UN is a quality exercise.  I not only enjoy myself while there, I enjoy doing the research for my committees.  Writing a position paper is an onerous exercise, but you are forced to learn about a new angle of historical or modern international relations.  And I find it interesting.  I really wish my delegation went to more of these events, because I would go to as many of them as I could.  If any of you reading know of any conferences that are still open for registration, please let me know in the comments, because I am currently trying to figure out if I can attend more as an independent delegate.  Even if it's for next year, I'd love to begin figuring things out!

Solving the Korean War

Saturday's PMUNC sessions involved settling our second major question: Soviet Involvement in the Korean War.  Admittedly the people on my committee were less interesting in this question than in the German Division question, but I think the Korean Conflict turned out to be quite interesting.
We began the session in October 1950 as the UN coalition forces bear down on the Yalu River.  These UN Coalition forces (from our perspective) threaten the sovereignty of two communist nations (North Korea and China) and have demonstrated capitalist imperialism by over reaching their assigned mission by making incursions into North Korea instead of simply defending South Korea.  To be honest, I'm beginning to think the historical committees are designed to make the delegates appreciate what good decisions were made in the past; as our crises played out, we found ourselves adhering more and more to the course of the actual conflict.  Of course we weren't perfectly historically accurate, but we came pretty damn close.  We began by resolving to send overt humanitarian aid and covert military aid to both the Chinese and North Korean armies and asserting the rights of Communist Nations (simply put, they have the right to exist and other communist nations have the right to defend them).  Then one of our planes got shot down.  A few press releases later, we get word that the Americans are positioning nuclear warheads in the Yellow Sea to bomb China and North Korea and the Chinese forces have simply attacked the Americans (sorry, UN coalition forces) without any directive from Moscow or even close to enough equipment.  We drafted some more press releases, positioned our troops in Eastern Russia in the event of an attack on our sovereign territory (that was a directive I sponsored with the delegate who played Marshal Zhukov) and drafted a peace treaty between the Americans and the Chinese.  Long story short, we narrowly avoided nuclear war.  We also drafted what would have been a precursor to the Warsaw Pact if it had happened in real time.  The document created an economic union between soviet nations and created a mutual defence clause.  This all happened in the space of seven hours.  If that's not enough reason to put Model UN kids in charge of the real world, I don't know what is.

All in all, I had a great time at this conference.  I was originally unsure about it (and by unsure I mean less than excited), but it really turned out to be a great time.  As we say on committee: "Long Live Brosef Stalin, wise, illustrious, glorious, and patriotic leader of the Broviet Union!"

Welcome to PMUNC

As of last night, I am Nikolai Bulganin on the Politburo of the USSR, 1945. Why? you may ask. Because I am a member of the Greenwich Academy delegation at the Princeton Model UN Conference. Just when you thought I couldn't get any nerdier, you find out I'm a Model Government kid. In my defense, I am no where near as intense as some of the other kids. I thought my binder was good, but some kids have 3 1/2 inch binders that legitimately don't close.  But enough about Model Government kids, lets talk about historical international relations!
My committee this year is the Politburo of the USSR, so all the delegates are different members of the main policy making body of the  Soviet Union.  I'm pretty sure the only downside of being on this committee is having to memorize multisylabic russian names.  As of our fourth committee meeting we have resolved our first crisis topic: policy making regarding post-Nazi Germany at the Yalta Conference. One thing that's really cool about historical committees is the ability to correct the mistakes of the past. Of course that's not to say that we have, but having the knowledge that we can is really cool.  I think my committee this year strikes an interesting balance between historical accuracy and fantasy.  We all represent different soviet Russians and we (for the most part) portray them with historical accuracy, but we have to respond to fictional crises.  Today, we were threatened by an Allied that to invade the motherland (which was later discovered to be a bluff) and a Japanese attack on Soviet territory near Vladivostok. Both were dealt with quickly and efficiently. So efficiently that we had time to draft and pass a treaty regarding the division and governance/management of postwar Germany as well a the extraction of reparations from German territories.  In the midst of all this directive passing, three of our number were sent to the gulag and two executed.  It's been a busy day.  Personally, I'm very impressed and happy with our plan for reparations; I think it's comprehensive and effective. I have some reservations regarding the way our treaty divided up Germany, but that's mostly because the plan I sponsored with Korotchenko which comprehensively went through Germany province by province and divided it between the Allied powers didn't get passed. I think the one we did pass is too general.
All in all, I'm really happy with what has gone down already in my committee.  I'll do my best to keep y'all updated, but I'm currently blogging from my phone because I'm too cheap to pay for internet.  Tomorrow we begin our next topic: how to handle Soviet involvement in the Korean conflict. Can't wait!