Generazione 1000 Euro
posted by Esther  on 1/31/06 12:12 PM
Whether you're saving pennies for the latest (and tiniest) mp3 player, concerned with your parents' complete control over your weekly allowance, or your after-school job is just not cutting it, you're not alone—we've all got cash flow issues. Managing your wallet is something that everyone, no matter age or location, needs to deal with. But, according to a new online novel that is sweeping Italy, the everlasting challenge of making ends meet does not have to translate to an uneventful, uninteresting (and iPod-less) life.
Generazione 1000 Euro tells the story of twenty-seven-year-old Claudio, who struggles to achieve an enjoyable lifestyle on a very limited budget of 1000 Euro per month (a measly $15,000-$20,000 a year). Working as an account manager in a firm that specializes in cell-phone gadgets, the fictional Claudio reflects a slew of real-life young professionals who are forced to compromise wages for a career in the creative field. Like many young Europeans, Claudio has a good education and a decent job, yet his ability to spend is severely limited by being "undervalued."
But, Claudio's financial obstacles do not stop him from enjoying the good life. Authors Antonio Incorvaia and Alessandro Rimassa claim Claudio and the rest of his generation have learned that smart budgeting and conscientious economic decisions does not mean you have to forgo your favorite restaurant or mp3 player of choice. Even with his situation, Claudio is able to do the things he loves, which include attending parties and traveling to various locales.
The immense popularity of Generazione 1000 Euro shows how widespread Claudio's plight is. The free e-novel has already been downloaded by thousands of readers, proving that the financial struggle of the young professional has no boundaries. Generazione 1000 Euro is not only a relevant tale, it also serves as a useful resource for anyone looking for ideas on how to manage a skimpy bank account.
If Claudio's money woes sound something like your own, worry not. It may be a scary and expensive world out there, but Claudio proves that living responsibly and making cost-effective choices can amount to a lifestyle packed with hobbies and interests.
 When I was in kindergarten, I won an impromptu drawing contest against a first-grader. My teacher made a big deal about it, but if you had asked me then what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have told you, "A truck driver, a race car driver, or a fire fighter." The proof was in my drawings. My sketchbooks were filled with trucks, race cars, and firemen on ladders. I was in the habit of drawing absolutely anything that interested me: cowboys, tree houses, Spider-man cartoons. My second grade teacher, Becky Neighberger, read to our class sometimes. I vividly remember the stories: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardobe; Prince Caspian; The Voyage of the Dawntreader; and The Book of Three. I drew everything that she read to us—I enjoyed it so much. I begged for hints about future chapters so that I could complete my illustrations. I begged for more time to draw. Mrs. Neighberger had to coax me out to recess.
On one of those days, I showed her my cross section of the Royal Ship of Narnia. She acknowledged it by saying "You're going to be an illustrator when you grow up." An illustrator? Mrs. Neighberger indicated the painting on the cover of our book. There were line drawings inside the book, too. "It's someone's job to draw all these," she said. People get paid to draw?!
Like most children, I found the pictures were my favorite part of almost any book. But illustration as a profession boggled my mind.
I continued to draw, of course. I created one-page comic strips. I designed fantasy club houses. I wrote and illustrated a zine about Transformers. If you asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have given a different answer each year: "A toy designer, a karate sensei, an architect." My mom told me about the doctor who repaired her bad knee. To explain the surgery, he diagrammed it on butcher paper from his examination table. "I could be that kind of doctor," I thought. My mom was proud of this idea. "You would be a great doctor," she beamed.
Looking back now, I can see my professional life as a romance of sorts. I flirted with a dozen other jobs. I had crushes on truck driving and fire fighting. I "dated" a book store for several years. I got into serious relationships with farm work and teaching. But I have loved drawing for as long as I can remember.
I began working as an illustrator almost seven years ago. Like a marriage, the reality of my profession is different than the fantasy. I spent the first few months eating condiments instead of groceries. When I do get work, I get a lot of work. I stay up drawing for days and nights on end. I don't have time for friends or fun. When I don't have work, I wonder if I will ever have work again. If you look around SparkNotes, though, you will find a dozen or more of my drawings. Just a few days ago, I drew a scene from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. That's what I do for a living—the same thing that I did for fun in second grade.
What do you do for fun?
— Rama Hughes
Food for Thought: Adventures in College Eating
posted by Guest Editor on 10/5/05 2:35 PM
About a month into my freshman year of college, my girlfriends and I decided to pull out the dusty scale from under my bed. My friend Charlotte gasped when she realized that the scale said she was ten pounds heavier. We all took our turns weighing in and decided that the scale must be wrong. We had all gained ten pounds—it couldn't be true! Our self-satisfying delusion was shattered when our friend Adam stepped on the scale and exclaimed that he had actually lost weight. As we glared in his direction, we realized that eating cookie dough ice cream at lunch and dinner might not be the best idea. It was time to figure out how to have fun while still retaining some semblance of caloric consciousness.
 Between dining halls, campus grocery stores, late-night pizza, power hours, and the endless consumption of Mountain Dew in order to pull that all-nighter, college life inevitably packs on the pounds. In my experience, the freshman fifteen can be the freshman five, ten, or even twenty. The dining hall is a freshman's main source of sustenance and the cause of many a weight woe. Though every dining hall is different, they all seem to offer the same thing: a variety of unappetizing main courses, a decent salad bar, the always reliable peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and a very enticing dessert selection.
My friends had their own unique ways of handling the dining hall dilemma. One friend decided that she wouldn't eat anything precooked. Her meals took on the quality of the trendy raw food movement: her dinner consisted of piles of celery, cottage cheese, and cucumbers. Another friend believed that avoiding the dining hall was the best way to deal. She would skip breakfast and lunch claiming her "stomach didn't wake up" until dinner. Yet another friend took to snacking on frozen peas and carrots—certainly a low-calorie strategy, albeit a bizarre one. Although these are all interesting approaches to cafeteria cuisine, here are some less quirky ideas for how to make the most of the dining hall.
- To avoid the pitfalls of "all you can eat," or conversely, "there's nothing I want to eat," survey your options instead of just zeroing in on the first thing that catches your eye (i.e. the dripping-with-fat-macaroni and cheese). Impulse eating is often a major source of regret and weight gain.
- An always excellent option is grilled or roasted chicken—it's hard to mess up and it's good for you. Stay away from more complicated meat dishes with heavy sauces or complicated names (Polynesian-style tempura chicken anyone?). These often taste nasty and are filled with calories.
- Stir-fry can spice up the blandness of institutional food. Adding some great veggies—think baby corn, waterchestnuts, bamboo shoots—and tofu can be very yummy. Just be careful not to drench your healthy meal in sauce.
- The salad bar can offer great taste and low calories. A salad with tuna or chicken can be an entire meal. But try to avoid the pre-made salad dressings with unnatural colors or consistencies (bright pink is definitely suspicious). Oil and vinegar is both better tasting and better for you.
- If you can't resist the fried chicken, pizza, or brownies, go for it, but don't go back for seconds and thirds. One brownie at dinner is not so bad as long as it doesn't turn into six brownies. Trust me, it can happen.
- You don't have to give up cheeseburgers and fries, but skip dessert if you have them.
- Speaking of dessert, fruit or frozen yogurt is a great choice. Add some granola and peanut butter to vanilla frozen yogurt, and you have your own version of Coldstone.
My friends and I discovered that there is a fine line between living large and actually being large—we struggled with eating for the entire year. The dining hall, we all learned, is less than perfect, but thankfully it's not forever. Although filled with high calorie landmines, the dining hall does offer healthy and satisfying eats if you're willing to look. Take some time to think through what you want to eat, and you'll not only avoid the pounds, but have better meals.
Still, on those days when things just tend to suck and you need a slice of pizza and two pieces of chocolate cake, don't worry about it. It's college after all.
— Sara Weiss
Paging Doctor Cruise
posted by Guest Editor on 6/24/05 2:07 PM
 In his new movie, War of the Worlds, Tom Cruise plays a father who, confronted by alien attack, must battle for the future of humankind. In his personal life, the actor—apparently incapable of distinguishing between movie fiction and reality—has embarked on a similar battle against the field of psychiatry. By now, his comments about antidepressants as a treatment for postpartum depression are well known. Instead of Paxil and counseling, "Doctor Cruise" offers vitamins and exercise. One wonders how the husband of Andrea Yates, the woman who drowned her five children in the bathtub in 2001 while in the throes of severe postpartum depression, would receive this advice. His assertions that psychiatry is "Nazi science" are also well publicized, but, unfortunately, in inverse proportion to their veracity. Contrary to what "Professor Cruise" would have his students—that is, his fans—believe, Carl Jung, one of the fathers of psychoanalysis, was not an editor for the Nazi papers during WWII; and methadone, a treatment for narcotic withdrawal, was not originally called Adolophine in honor of Adolf Hitler. Cruise's rants are not only unfounded, but also offensive, given the actual horrors committed by Nazi scientists. The most destructive of his comments, however, is this morning's declaration that "there is no such thing as a chemical imbalance." This most recent untruth threatens to set psychiatric medicine back generations. Thanks to decades of research, scientists no longer regard mental illnesses as personal weaknesses, as Cruise's remarks insinuate, but as medical ailments akin to diabetes. For example, just as diabetes is caused by too little insulin, depression is understood—in a simplistic model—to be due to too little serotonin; obsessive-compulsive disorder, to too much dopamine. Similarly, just as diabetes is treated with insulin or other anti-hyperglycemic medications, depression can be treated with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) or other medicines that enhance serotonin's effect at synapses in the brain. Certainly, there is need for debate about using medication to treat psychiatric illnesses, particularly when children are the sufferers. There is also need for more research about the underlying mechanisms of these illnesses. But the point is that underlying mechanisms, based in an individual's biology, do exist and that medication, therefore, is a legitimate means to intercept these mechanisms. To assert otherwise, as Cruise continues to do, is dangerous. If it is malpractice to prescribe "willpower" to treat diabetes, then it is just as irresponsible to tell the parent of an out-of-control, uneducable child to will away his ADD or a suicidal teenager to simply will away her depression. If this is the future for humankind, then we are in trouble indeed. The author, currently a third-year medical student at the University of Pennsylvania, has a BA in Cognitive Neuroscience from Harvard University.
Getting Over It
posted by Margo on 6/15/05 12:55 PM
 A broken heart is never fun. But imagine one that comes with no warning, when you're in a strange country, in a hotel room where your beloved has promised to meet you—and instead of meeting you, he's sent a telegram to the airport that suggests he's been in a terrible accident, and you've spent ten hours trying to reach him from your hotel room phone, and on the phone he says he's met someone else and won't be joining you after all. What do you do? If you're Sophie Calle, a French artist, the first thing you do once you register what's happened is take a picture of the red telephone that gave you the bad news. This breakup actually happened to Calle about fifteen years ago. It's a horrible story, but Calle has turned it into a beautiful photographic exhibition. The exhibition is divided into two parts: before heartbreak, and after. The first part consists of nintety-two photographs, letters, receipts, and other ephemera from a three-month trip she took to Japan—a trip that wound up, unbeknownst to her, being a countdown to a broken heart. Each photo is stamped violently in red: 92 DAYS TO UNHAPPINESS. 91 DAYS TO UNHAPPINESS. And so forth, all the way to 1 DAY TO UNHAPPINESS, which is stamped over the telegram she received from her lover at the airport. Calle took these photos while she was infused with longing for the man she left behind. The letters speak of their reunion; she even has a picture of the outfit she planned to wear for it. But there is no room here for giddiness and romance. Each red stamp is a reminder of what's coming—it's as though Calle went through every memory, every romantic thought, and marked them false, false, false.
The second half of the exhibition, "After," looms just around the corner. Here, the story of her heartbreak is embroidered again and again onto about twenty large panels, each panel accompanied by the photo of the red phone. She tells the story in slightly different words each time, and each time, she grows more detached—and the embroidery thread gets darker. By the last panel, the words are barely visible—and there are fewer words to read. Calle gets over her heartbreak by getting sick of her own story.
There's another part to her recovery. Misery loves company—and to get over her broken heart, Calle interviewed friends and strangers about the moment when they suffered most. These stories are embroidered onto panels that appear next to her repeated story. By the end of the exhibition, Calle has given a veritable catalogue of suffering—heartbreak, disappointment, death, illness, anger. It's all there.
These stories are not easy to read, and reading Calle's story so many time gets depressing, tedious, and more than a little overwhelming. However, I left the exhibition feeling, if not uplifted, then at least calm. Calle's next-to-last panel, in barely visible embroidery, says simply, Enough. She couldn't tell the story again—she didn't need to. Her suffering was over. |
