Two “portraits” by Grace. Top is Chloe and bottom is Sydney (in her bikini!).
Month: February 2008
I have a couple of habits that I am realizing are terribly un-green. One is my amazon habit … a friend turned me on to Amazon Prime and now that shipping is always free I just click and order books as I read about them … I never think to bundle my purchases and regularly receive multiple boxes in a single day. Terrible! The other is my Starbucks habit … I just love that tall (venti) cup with its very own adult sippy cup lid.
I was at Starbucks today with Whit and was waiting forever, so I studied the menu (which I rarely do). I noticed in tiny print at the bottom of one of the panels a mention that if you bring your own cup you will receive 10 cents off the price of your drink. I started thinking about this. Clearly 10 cents is not incentive enough, nor are they advertising this program at all. If they raised the price of all drinks by 40 cents and then gave people 50 cents off for bringing their own cups … now we’re talking. I realize this would have big implications for the barista process (now look at that – a TOM-style observation, from HBS first year!) – how to keep track of whose cup is whose, how to price for the three sizes when cups vary in size, etc. Seems to me it would be worth making these adjustments to save all of those paper cups.
Just a thought.
I found this today in my internet perambulations, and it is so right on with how I feel I just wanted to share it:
“…just please, please, please leave gaps in your shiny optimised parenting to get wrong and messy.
Teaching kids how to surf on the crest of chaos and anarchy, is one of the most useful life skills we can impart. Though we need to be free (and admittedly organised) enough to play; we cannot let the processes rather than their personhood become the goal.”
Somewhere I feel I never went
As I ran past HBS this morning I was struck by the familiar feeling that I simply never went there. I really honestly can barely remember anything of those two years. The photo above seems to prove that I did graduate, but if not for the photographic evidence of 2 years and the handful of friends I met there, I might believe it didn’t actually happen.
I never felt at home at HBS, never felt quite like I fit. Perhaps this ought to have been my first clue that the Business World was not for me! I also can think of almost nothing that I actually learned there. I wonder if this is because I spent 90% of my in-class time doing the Times crossword or (more often) reading the cases for the next day’s classes. This is the most salient example I can think of NOT Being Here Now. My God. I was so focused on getting done with the next day’s work that I never heard a damned thing in today’s class. Anna seemed to have the same strategy, and she and I had many free nights with nothing to do since we were done with our homework. Anna, however, seems to have emerged from HBS with a few skills and things learned, so I am forced to conclude this is another data point supporting the fact that I really am an idiot.
I guess that is one thing that HBS gave me: Anna. We were friendly at Princeton but didn’t get close until HBS. While I am a mental midget compared to Anna, she’s the friend who most understands the intellectual and mental restlessness I feel, who knows the angst of having a big gaping hole where “life’s professional passion” should be. She too has lots of interests, none of them compelling. She consumes life at breakneck speed, searching, always, as I am, for an animating interest, for an internal compass. For me to have a friend with whom I can share the many challenges and joys of this way of living is an enormous gift.
Since we’ve both become mothers, our relationship has deepened. Anna is one of my favorite mother friends – she is funny and pragmatic, charmed and unsentimental, and always incisively observant when talking about Zachary and Ava. She shares my awareness of how frustration and awe coexist in every minute of mothering.
So, while I really can’t read an income statement, don’t understand a lick about macroeconomics, and still struggle to remember the five forces, I guess HBS was worth it if I found Anna there!
Have just started listening to In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto in the car. Despite Pollan not reading his own book (it’s one of my fundamental tenets, I’m realizing, that an author should read their own audio book!) it’s very very interesting. And I confess that I found The Omnivore’s Dilemma a heavy slog (and didn’t finish it).
I am charmed by the basic assertion of the first part of the book. Pollan derides the practice of “nutritionism,” which is privileging the individual nutritional components of a food above the whole food. The science is compelling, yes, but even more than that I love this, another confirmation that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. This is how I feel about so much in life; for example, people, who are so much more than their individual attributes and skills. There is so much more to a person – so much that is both strong and weak, ineffable and fleeting, that contributes to who we each are. That this is apparently true of food as well is not at all surprising, and makes me smile.