Argosy

Argosy scarf, from Knitty.com.

Specs:
one skein Malabrigo Yarn, worsted weight, "Pollen" colorway, size 8US needles (5mm).

Love this scarf. My favorite yarn, my favorite weight, my favorite needle size, gorgeous color (not my favorite color, which would be red).

I made this for my March European trip. Most of my clothes were black or dark red and the weather would be grey. So this yellow, with it's lemon and orange-y gradations would be my pop of color. I made a pill box hat to match with another skein, and in Rome, bought a yellow umbrella. It was fun walking in the rain at the NATO headquarters with my yellow.

World Wide Knit in Public Day

Ah, Friday. Almost the weekend and no meetings today. So that means I can catch up on my blogging! I mean my work blog.

In March I went on a fellowship trip throughout Europe, using work time. There's a board meeting coming up Sunday. Therefore, I must finish typing up my notes from the trip and post it on the blog for the board of directors to read (if they want to). Hopefully, at the end, this typing and thinking and reflecting will result in Lessons Learned for me to report to the board. Because in my line of work, there are always a Lessons Learned section in any written report.

However, on the way into work, I almost snorted up my coffee onto my white pants because I was listening to Lime and Violet's latest podcast. If you have not heard them, you must click on their link to the right and sign up right now. They are hilarious and make my commute much easier to bear. Not my commute is all that bad, usually.

This weekend will be my last pottery class until the fall because the place I go for classes doesn't offer adult evening classes in summer. Something about school being out and kids needing classes. Yes, but their classes are in the day. We adults, who pay the taxes for the county facility and pay the kids classes costs, would still like our classes in the evening. I am not seeing how offering day classes prohibits offering evening classes. Every summer, I compose a letter to the county about this, and I never send it. But this year I will.

So until pottery classes start again in the fall, I'll join one of the s 'n' b s in the Atlanta area. There are plenty, to choose from. And then by the time World Wide Knit in Public Day comes on June 9, I'll know people to go with.

In Atlanta, it will be held at the IKEA cafe starting at 11am. So come out and represent!

Push to achieve tied to suicide in Asian-American women

From CNN.com. Again, I've highlighted the parts that I think are most important. This article so totally spoke to me, even down to the living in Houston part and women wanting surgery to look more European.

Certainly, I felt the pressures, the isolation, and the self-hate described in this article, but not to this extent. I thought I was beyond it, but as I re-read the article and write this post, my gut tells me it's a recovery process that I'm still working on.

And lastly, is it just coincidence that this came out during Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month?

Push to achieve tied to suicide in Asian-American women

POSTED: 11:59 a.m. EDT, May 16, 2007

Story Highlights
• Suicide second-leading cause of death for Asian-American women 15-24
• Highest suicide rate among women of any race, ethnicity for that age group
• Experts cite "model minority" expectations, family pressures as factors

MORE ON CNN TV: Elizabeth Cohen examines depression in Asian-American women and the cultural stigma against getting help, on "Paula Zahn Now," 8 p.m. ET

by Elizabeth CohenCNN

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- One evening in 1990, Eliza Noh hung up the phone with her sister. Disturbed about the conversation, Noh immediately started writing a letter to her sister, a college student who was often depressed. "I told her I supported her, and I encouraged her," Noh says.

But her sister never read the letter. By the time it arrived, she'd killed herself.
Moved by that tragedy, Noh has spent much of her professional life studying depression and suicide among Asian-American women. An assistant professor of Asian-American studies at California State University at Fullerton, Noh has read the sobering statistics from the Department of Health and Human Services: Asian-American women ages 15-24 have the highest suicide rate of women in any race or ethnic group in that age group. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for Asian-American women in that age range.

Depression starts even younger than age 15. Noh says one study has shown that as young as the fifth grade, Asian-American girls have the highest rate of depression so severe they've contemplated suicide.

As Noh and others have searched for the reasons, a complex answer has emerged.

First and foremost, they say "model minority" pressure -- the pressure some Asian-American families put on children to be high achievers at school and professionally -- helps explain the problem.

"In my study, the model minority pressure is a huge factor," says Noh, who studied 41 Asian-American women who'd attempted or contemplated suicide. "Sometimes it's very overt -- parents say, 'You must choose this major or this type of job' or 'You should not bring home As and Bs, only As," she says. "And girls have to be the perfect mother and daughter and wife as well."

Family pressure often affects girls more than boys, according to Dr. Dung Ngo, a psychologist at Baylor University in Texas. "When I go talk to high school students and ask them if they experience pressure, the majority who raised their hands were the girls," he said.

Asian-American parents, he says, are stricter with girls than with boys. "The cultural expectations are that Asian women don't have that kind of freedom to hang out, to go out with friends, to do the kinds of things most teenagers growing up want to do."

And in Asian cultures, he added, you don't question parents. "The line of communication in Asian culture one way. It's communicated from the parents downward," he says. "If you can't express your anger, it turns to helplessness. It turns inward into depression for girls. For boys it's more likely to turn outwards into rebellious behavior and behavioral problems like drinking and fighting."

But Noh says pressure from within the family doesn't completely explain the shocking suicide statistics for young women like her sister.

She says American culture has adopted the myth that Asians are smarter and harder-working than other minorities.

"It's become a U.S.-based ideology, popular from the 1960s onward, that Asian-Americans are smarter, and should be doing well whether at school or work."

Noh added that simply being a minority can also lead to depression.

"My sister had a really low self-image. She thought of herself as ugly," she says. "We grew up in Houston in the '70s and '80s, and at that time in school there were very few Asian faces. The standard of beauty she wanted to emulate was white women." In college, Noh's sister had plastic surgery to make her eyes and nose appear more European-looking.

Heredity, Noh says, also plays a role. She says in her study, many of the suicidal women had mothers who were also suicidal. She says perhaps it's genetic -- some biochemical marker handed down from mother to daughter -- or perhaps it's the daughter observing the mother's behavior. "It makes sense. You model yourself after the parent of the same gender."

As varied as the causes of depression, Noh says she saw just as many approaches to overcoming it.

While some women in her study did seek help through counseling and prescription drugs, most of her subjects were ambivalent or even negative about counseling. "They felt the counselor couldn't understand their situation. They said it would have helped if the counselor were another Asian-American woman."

These women found help through their religious faith, herbs, acupuncture, or becoming involved in groups that help other Asian women.

"It shows the resourcefulness of these women," she says. "They had really diverse healing strategies."

Elizabeth Cohen is a CNN Medical News correspondent. Senior producer Jennifer Pifer and associate producer Sabriya Rice contributed to this report.

Stash busting

This weekend I was not up for any heavy brain activity, such as comparing the knitting instructions for my sister's sweater to the sleeves themselves and then trying to figure out where I went wrong.

That's the problem with knitting -- every single stitch is your responsibility and there's no one to blame but you. In gardening, the plants grow on their own and sun, rain, soil composition, bugs, rabbits, voles, etc. all introduce elements of unpreditability. In pottery, the clay tells me what it wants to be, and then the glazes and kiln firings (done by other people), make each visit to the pottery studio a surprise. In gardening and pottery, things change without you making it happen.

Not so with knitting. Sweaters don't make themselves while you're gone and all mistakes are your own. Wouldn't it be great to have Mrs. Weasley's magical knitting needles, that knit on their own? We would be able to use up our yarn stash so much faster.

Speaking of stash-busting, I started 2 baby blankets this weekend and have decided to use up as much of my yarn as possible making baby blankets. You never know when a friend will announce a pregnancy and wouldn't it be nice to have something ready to give? This would be especially helpful when long-distance friends tell you with only weeks to go.

So this is what I'm working on:
1. I found a double crocheted 12 inch square of Mountain Colors Barefoot yarn in the Mystic Lake colorway that I made some time ago and one ball each of Knit Picks Essential Solid in burgundy, navy, and dark green. Clearly I was going to make something with this, so it will now be a baby blanket. It's sock weight yarn, so it'll take forever to finish. However, it's also thin and small, so it's my portable project.
2. Using Cascade Sierra in navy, light blue, pink, and white, held double, and crocheting stripes with a size J hook. I tried knitting, but Sierra is 80% cotton, 20% merino wool and 0% stretchable. So my first try, knitting, resulted in aching arms and elbows. Knitting is supposed to be fun, not painful. Now, I'm trying to use up the yarn as quickly as possible, just to get rid of it. What I do like is that holding one strand of navy, and one strand of either the light blue or pink results in a very pretty tweed effect. Will post pictures soon.

On the back burner: Husband's afghan and Sister's sweater, both in Cascade 220.

Gah! Sleeve mistake

I'm knitting this sweater for my sister:

It's Bicolor Cables from Interweave Knits. She wants it brown and pink instead of brown and green.

I'm working on both sleeves at once, from the cuff up and am shaping the sleeve caps. And just found out that one sleeve is at least 10 stitches wider at this point than the other.

So, it's going to go in the knitting basket for a while and may be when I pull it out this weekend, the stitches will have evened out by themselves.

Here's hoping that magical thinking works

Growing gap

As a sociologist and social activist, this really got to me. I've highlighted in blue what I think are the most relevent parts.

The Divisions That Tighten the Purse Strings

Studies suggest that America’s diversity goes a long way toward explaining why government spending on social welfare programs is much lower than in Europe.

By EDUARDO PORTER, New York Times, April 29, 2007

MANY Americans are skeptical about government spending on social programs, and they cite a litany of familiar reasons: big government programs aren’t effective, they are vulnerable to waste and abuse, and they run counter to the libertarian, self-reliant spirit of the nation’s founders.

But a growing body of research suggests that America’s antipathy toward big government has another, less-often-acknowledged underpinning: the nation’s racial and ethnic diversity.
Recent studies by economists and other social scientists have found that this mix tends to undermine support for government spending on “public goods” of all types, whether health care, roads or welfare programs for the disadvantaged.

Some of these studies suggest that America’s rich diversity — not only ethnic and racial but also religious and linguistic — goes a long way toward explaining why government spending on social welfare programs is much lower than it is in the more homogeneous nations of Europe. Other studies have found that within the United States, local support for various types of public spending falls as diversity rises.

“Racial divisions and ethnic divisions reduce incentives for people to be generous to others through social welfare,” said Alberto Alesina, a professor of economics at Harvard. “This is very unfortunate. But as social scientists, we can’t close our eyes to something we don’t like.”
In America, government spending on social transfers — everything from food stamps and unemployment insurance to health care and pensions — is about a third less than it is in Italy, France or Belgium, when expressed as a share of the economy, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. And it is about half the level of Sweden’s. Moreover, Americans pay less in taxes than the citizens of nearly every other wealthy nation in the O.E.C.D.

In their 2004 book, “Fighting Poverty in the U.S. and Europe,” Mr. Alesina and Edward Glaeser, another Harvard economist, applied statistical regression techniques to correlate data on government spending with data on racial, ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity in Western Europe and the United States. The professors concluded that about half the gap between Europe and the United States in public spending on social programs could be explained by America’s more varied racial and ethnic mix. (They said that much of the rest resulted from stronger left-wing parties in Europe.)

As William Julius Wilson suggested in his 1996 book, “When Work Disappears: the World of the New Urban Poor,” many white Americans turned against spending on welfare during the 1970s because they thought that it mostly served blacks. “White taxpayers saw themselves as being forced, through taxes, to pay for medical and legal services that many of them could not afford for their own families,” Mr. Wilson wrote.

In the relative homogeneity of Sweden, by contrast, most taxpayers are confident that social spending programs will be directed to people much like themselves.

This doesn’t mean Americans are stingy. In fact, they contribute much more than Europeans to charity, selecting who they want to help. “It’s not that Americans are bad guys,” Mr. Glaeser said. “They just want to target it.”

But in drawing on a wide range of data like population surveys and patterns of municipal spending, researchers have found ample evidence of how ethnic and racial diversity has undermined support for spending on social welfare in the United States.

In a study in 2001, Erzo F. P. Luttmer, an associate professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, reported that the percentage of people who say they support welfare spending decreases as the share of local recipients from their own racial group falls. His report was based on data from the General Social Survey, a social-attitudes poll conducted across the United States nearly every year since 1972.

In another study, published in 1996, James Poterba, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that public spending on education falls as the percentage of elderly people in a given area rises. The reduction, he found, “is particularly large when the elderly residents and the school-age population are from different racial groups.”

In a 1997 study, Mr. Alesina, along with Reza Baqir, an economist at the International Monetary Fund, and William Easterly, an economics professor at New York University, looked at the relationship between social spending and ethnic diversity in 2,700 cities, counties and metropolitan areas across the United States.

They found that in more diverse cities and counties, the share of local government spending on public goods — in this case, roads, sewage treatment, trash clearance and education — was generally lower than it was in more homogeneous localities. “Our results are consistent with the idea that white majorities vote to reduce the supply of productive public goods as the share of blacks and other minorities increases,” they wrote.

Of course, there are some exceptions to the pattern. New York and California, for instance, are among the most highly taxed and most diverse states, although there is evidence that racial and ethnic tensions have whittled away at support for public spending. In California, to cite just one example, Proposition 187, barring illegal immigrants from access to public services, passed in 1994 on the support of 63 percent of whites, despite the opposition of four of every five Latinos.
New York’s history also has examples of ethnic tensions.

But New York City, in a way, is a special case: so diverse that no single ethnic or racial majority controls the public purse. “There is no cleavage between an Anglo majority and some poor minority,” Mr. Glaeser said. “In New York, everybody is a minority.”

New York City’s experience, in fact, underscores that diversity does not automatically lead to hostility among ethnic groups or toward government spending as a whole. From public education to intermarriage to the many institutions in civil society promoting mutual understanding, there are countervailing forces acting to overcome ethnic, religious or linguistic cleavages.

Ethnic diversity doesn’t inevitably reduce spending on public goods. Rather, spending tends to fall when elected officials choose to run and govern on platforms that heighten racial and ethnic divisions. Over the long term, governments usually find it in their interest to bridge the centrifugal forces of diversity rather than to exploit them, if only to promote stability.

STILL, there is little reason to believe that the racial, ethnic, religious and linguistic antagonisms that have eroded support for social welfare programs in the United States are likely to abate any time soon. Indeed, the arrival of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants a year from Latin America seems to be sapping support for public welfare.

Last year, laws were enacted in Arizona, Colorado, Rhode Island and Hawaii barring illegal immigrants from access to some government programs. This month, the State Senate in Oklahoma overwhelmingly passed legislation that would bar illegal immigrants from receiving public benefits.

And these restrictive attitudes can easily turn against spending on domestic programs as a whole. Representative Tom Tancredo, a Colorado Republican running for president on an anti-immigration platform, says that Americans pay too much in taxes and that the Internal Revenue Service should be abolished. His candidacy may not prosper, but the issues on which he is running are likely to be around for some time.

Mr. Alesina certainly expects further conflicts. “One can expect public support for public goods to erode further,” he said. “Public spending in law and order might not go down. What would go down is spending on redistribution.”

In honor of Earth Day and Arbor Day...

I have cut down the 9 pine trees in my yard. Now I have only 2 dogwood trees and lots of overgrown holly and azalea shrubs.

We took them down because they sway alarmingly during storms. Every year some tree comes down and takes out power lines. Thankfully, they haven't taken out any houses or cars, but I'm not waiting for that to happen.

The pine needles that fall from them also suppress grass growth and now half our lawn is just dirt. Attractive. Husband wants to tear everything up and put down sod and maybe a sprinkler system.

This Saturday morning, a landscape designer will come out to give us a plan. If we're going to redo the front yard, we're going to redo it right.