Where To Add Organ Donor Info on Facebook

I read today that Facebook is encouraging organ donations.  I think this is a great effort and more people should be organ donors.  Ultimately I want this campaign to be successful (and it looks like it is) , but I do have a few concerns:

1. This feature is kind of hidden away.  In fact, I didn’t realize the amount of “Timeline Life Events” I could indicate until I started writing this.  This speaks to a larger problem Facebook has with rolling out new site changes without really communicating to their end-users that it’s happened. See the blog post photo to help with finding this feature’s location.
2. Life Event or Ease of Use? Part of the challenge in organ donations is that it makes us confront our mortality.  I’m not sure Facebook, with its real-time & past timeline focus, changes that mindset. Being an organ donor is kind of like the ultimate bucket list item – one day you’re gonna go and hopefully save some lives when it happens – but does that energy exist as a “life event” when you sign up?  Is it easy for me to just “like” that someone is a donor, but not do it myself or declare that I am one?  Is the campaign’s success hinged on it being a “life event” or that it’s just easier for people to sign up since usually we’re asked to make this decision only every few years with our driver’s license renewals?
3. Other Life Saving But Less Mortality Confronting Campaigns. Why not start with something life-saving that is also giving…while you’re still living?
1. Bone Marrow: Why not start a campaign for more people to register as Bone Marrow Donors?  Bone marrow donors require a genetic match and the more people who register, the more likely it is that a person who is suffering from life-threatening diseases like cancer can find a match.
2. Blood Donations: Why isn’t Giving Blood a life event? According to the Red Cross, “currently only 3 out of every 100 people in America donate blood” and “1 pint of blood can save up to 3 lives.”  And if you donate platelets, one donation can be worth 3 single doses for 3 patients – the equivalent of 12-18 whole blood donations.

On my walk back to the office from lunch, my co-workers and I were stopped by this really large protest.  It even blocked traffic coming from off the freeway – sorry Los Angeles drivers and bus transit riders.  It turned out to be a protest for Justice for Janitors, emphasizing more affordable healthcare and fairer wages.

A protest like this gives reason to pause and more than just for the inconvenience of traffic. A few minutes of protest is nothing compared to where we would be without our janitorial services.  Why do we then pay people who work this difficult job poorly?  Why do we then shrink on their healthcare?  Try going a week in this city without the people who help maintain the offices of government and corporate America.  It would be pretty darn terrible for everyone all around.

The janitorial staff at my building are some of my favorite people.  They don’t seem to judge me when I work late at night (sometimes when I’m singing aloud to whatever I have playing on Pandora) and always say hello and ask me how I am as they go about their jobs after office hours.  There is a janitor that maintains the glass doors and reception area of the building during the morning, who I see almost every day.  When I arrive really early to work, he comments on my change in routine. While I may not be working on projects with this staff and while there might not even be a sharing of our names, I really appreciate their presence in my life and what they do.  This place would fall apart without their efforts, as I’m sure all the other buildings would too.

People who think they run the world because they make business decisions are wrong.  That’s only part of the process.  There are other people who keep this world running too, and one of them is likely the person that pulls in a squeaky-wheeled trash can to sort out your office recyclables.

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I was in the GATE program (Gifted and Talented Education) where select public school students identified as gifted are given educational opportunities they wouldn’t have otherwise.  The California Department of Education describes that

Special efforts are made to ensure that pupils from economically disadvantaged and varying cultural backgrounds are provided with full participation in these unique opportunities.

Like almost all of of my peers, I fell into the demographic of “economically disadvantaged” and being of “varying cultural background”.  Much of the GATE programming leaned toward the arts.  In fifth grade, I worked with paints and learned about Vincent Van Gogh (French Impressionism is still my favorite period of art for this reason). In junior high, I went to see the Los Angeles Philharmonic perform Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in Downtown Los Angeles.  It’s still one of the best days in my memory.  Without this program, I know I wouldn’t have the appreciation for arts and culture that I have today.

When I was also in junior high, we put on two short adaptations of William Shakespeare – I was Juliet in Romeo & Juliet and in Macbeth I portrayed the different apparitions.

In Romeo & Juliet, my suitor Tybalt was a fourth grader when I was a seventh or eighth grader. He stood a good foot shorter than me (I’m sure he’s much taller now).  In part of the play, using our basic English translation of it, he literally looked up at me, saying:

“Hello, my love.”

In Macbeth, we didn’t really have much of a cauldron. You had to be creative with your props with limited resources and funding. We made due with a trash can that generally carried PE equipment. I was dragged onto stage while in this trash can. I went through my different incarnations as the apparitions and then the trash can was dragged off-stage.  I’m not sure why, but I tried to get out of this trash can in mid-movement. I think I was embarrassed due to the audience’s laughter of seeing me in a trash can in the first place. But my exit only made made it worse. Instead of escaping my embarrassment, I very “elegantly” fell out of the trashcan…in front of the entire Community Center audience.

In retrospect, it’s really funny.  At the time, not so much.

Remembering Shakespeare in my life reminds me of how important it is to support arts in education, to let it simmer while you’re young. While I don’t advocate that more students fall out of cauldron trash cans (though it does make you learn to laugh a little more), I do advocate the importance of arts education.

There’s value in knowing how much it takes to put on a production. There’s strength in knowing how much is at stake to be a performer or the teamwork required of a cast, even if you’re never going to be a performer when you grow older or you’re okay that your last claim to stage fame was being a tree in your first grade play.  Maybe you learned how much you liked making that tree, rather than acting like one.  There’s depth in how the arts can bridge gaps of self and social awareness and understanding, how teachers can help you learn lessons through the arts themselves.

Drawing, acting, singing, dancing, film making, writing – these are spaces where students are made better by exploration and the opportunity to learn and thrive.  These are spaces that should be available to all students, not those selected to be in a program or needing for something special to happen for it to exist in their lives.

So on your birthday, Shakespeare, I raise my glass to you, but really I raise my glass to teachers who work in the arts.  I raise my glass to everyone who makes arts something more accessible every day.  Without teachers and arts education, I really wouldn’t be here, and – I’m thinking – neither would you.

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*I’ve been told that he was baptized on the April 26th and his DOB is unknown

HBO

In all honesty, I wasn’t all that intrigued to watch HBO’s Girls until after reading Jenna Wortham’s Where (My) Girls At? and her discussion about the show’s lack of diversity.  But I gleaned from the article that there were good points to the show, accurate reflections of the twenty-something millenials bracket in which I belong.  So I tuned in to better understand if stories and identifiable characters could overcome these issues.

I identify with being twenty-something and its ironically crazy study of learning how much the world is “meh”.  I identify with the struggle to be an artist while doing the things that make ends meet.  I advocate being a dreamer and existing beyond structures.  I am glad that there is a show about women made by a woman.

I want to like this show for these many reasons, but I find that I don’t.

When I first began to write this post, I wanted to say that my disliking the show had nothing to do with the characters being white.  Primarily because that sounds kind of terrible and I have “white” friends I love and “whiteness” isn’t anything I question or define them by.  But while I have grown up watching shows and reading books predominantly about white female characters, there was something about watching this pilot that really irked me.  I kept on asking myself “Why am I supposed to care about these people?” because I really didn’t.

I think I’m supposed to care that lead character Hannah figures out her life and gets her book done – that she achieves her dreams and figures out life after being cut off from her parents.  But that requires me to sit through her “sense of entitlement” phase while getting advice from her friends.  That requires me to like her a little and I don’t even want to root for her.

These aren’t my girls.  These aren’t my people.

My people who have received monetary or emotional support from their parents (and others) are grateful for the help they receive.  If they were told they could no longer be supported, they would be grateful for what they received so far.  This isn’t something tied to color lines; this is a quality of the people I choose to keep in my life. I’m not saying they’re not going to complain, that I wouldn’t hear the “but I graduated from college” line and a preference not to work at McDonald’s, but underneath the “first world problems” is knowing that they’re lucky.

I understand that this is a show about people with “First World Problems”, but maybe the real problem is that we need more shows not about that subject.  Or at least, more acknowledgement about that #firstworldproblem hash tag beyond a secondary character (also white) on the pilot that is kind of obnoxious.

Maybe I’m not supposed to root for anyone on Girls or identify with anyone.  Maybe I’m supposed to face the confusion of the world with these girls.  But why would I do that?  I’m twenty-something.  I’m lost at times. I’m living that life acknowledging my first world problems, but not feeling entitled to my dreams, but hoping for them.  Why would I want any of them to bring me down?

I’m not saying that Girls doesn’t touch on subjects that are a part of our present-day culture, that there aren’t elements of the show that resonate with conversations I’ve had with my own girlfriends.  But that doesn’t make them my girls.

Maybe at the end of the day, I’m really the Asian girl who got the job because she knew Photoshop.  I know Photoshop. I like Lunabars.  I like water.  Maybe she had refugee parents like me or, completely different, she came from an affluent wealthy family that had been in America for generations but people assumed otherwise because she’s Asian.  Maybe she has an even greater sense of entitlement and I wouldn’t have identified with her at all.  What I’m saying is that her character sticks out to me not because of her presence as something different (as the girl that gets hired instead of Hannah), but because that difference has no depth.  So much could have been said in this bit part beyond that.  It could have gleaned something different about upper-class white America – that perhaps it isn’t so white or that “real world problems” do exist in this Girls world, but digs into a lack of character awareness but is acknowledged and very present in the show’s universe.

It’s been stated that the show’s homogeneity was “accidental”, but I don’t think that’s the case.  I think you write what you know.  And honestly, I don’t really want Lena Dunham to be writing non-white characters for the sake of diversity.  I don’t want her to throw in a lead character that is Asian or Latina or Black “just because”.  Such characters need to fit in the story somehow.  Are they also from upper-class privileged families, bringing non-white faces to “first world problems”? Are they opposite that, bringing something else into the discussion?

I don’t really need Girls to be my girls.  What I think it makes me want is the television media movement I grew up with – the one where we didn’t think twice that PBS’ Ghostwriter kids were Latino, Asian, Black, and Jewish.  What happened to that? What does it say about the TV world where it’s okay that Glee in Lima, Ohio has more diversity than Girls in New York City?  Is there some twenty-something age cut-off where people you hang out wth reflects “accidental” homogeneity?  I think if anything that should be less and less true as you grow older, especially if you’re in a large metropolis.

If anything perhaps Girls shows us a need for something more – real women beyond reality TV, real people facing problems not strictly typecast as “first world” (even if they might be “first world”).  What I wouldn’t mind is a diverse cast of twenty-somethings where I sit back and think “Those are my friends I have pizza with on Friday night.”

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Today I dressed in mostly red – a coat and rain boots – and declared that red was the color the day.  This flower is what I found after I struggled to open the door to the building, brightly sitting on the lobby floor, as if brought by the wind and even – if by random chance – brought to me.

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