Unfortunately, a friend lost one of his family members on Utøya island, and we share in his grief. Yesterday we had the honor of going to the rally for the victims and the rally for grief, solace, positivity, hope and love. It was just gorgeous. The pictures you’ve all likely seen from around the world don’t do it justice from being there in person. But it was just lovely.

I was just telling a friend today that I pity and thank Anders Breivik. I pity him and I thank him. It’s a shame he has lived his life so deprived of love and any kind of human understanding, and also shame on him for not taking responsibility for bettering himself as a person. He’s never known and will never know happiness, acceptance or joy. I think that’s a punishment far beyond what anyone can inflict physically or through law cuz those are things people want most in the world. And I thank him because people took a day yesterday to just be together in honest to God “being”. just hangin out, showing support for each other, crying with each other, laughing with each other, not giving in to the shit.

I’m thankful for the reminder. We know love.

The good people of the world, all of us who know love, need to step it up. Step it up, spread love, understanding, clarity, acceptance. We’ll never be outnumbered by the people in this world who haven’t yet learned the lessons we’ve learned and therefore act in the sad and awful ways they do. Our world is a beautiful and good one. As are its people. We’re responsible for teaching each other and for learning. Sad as all these events have been, I’ve actually felt more hope for people than I have in a very long time.

And for the first time in many days, the sun just came out.

Click here for W Magazine spread.

Thank God for iamamiwhoami, fronted by Jonna Lee. My best friend Sarah got me into her not 24 hours ago and I can’t stop listening and re-listening and re-watching. The videos are noted for their abstract concepts, seriously hauntng images, their use of animals, numeric codes and spookily lone letters as titles. My favorite one at the moment is the increasingly melodic, frenetic and fairy-esque “t”. The video makes me think of Anton Corbijn with color and more estrogen. She’s my new favorite artist and featured Woman in Art.

I welcome all suggestions for featured women in art, the stranger, the better. I will plug the hell out of them here. Just message me!

What the fuck happened?

I got married, for starters heheh. I got engaged in 2009 as some of you may remember, and moved to Norway in June 2010. I’ve been playing the get-settled game since then. I’m now working freelance as an editor and translator, proofer, writer, and all things Adobe-er. Building a client base has been slow, but the few I do have are fantastic and well known in their fields. I’m primarily working for people in the film and advertising industries.

I had a very affecting experience last year on the woman front, so to speak. I had ovarian surgery, my very first surgery as well, and it all brought me to a very compelling and occasionally scary place in my own personal evolution. The experience of being anesthetized alone is worth a thousand blog entries. But anyway, all is well, I am in good health again, married life is good.

I am working on new material for two projects and looking for full time work. This is pretty much my day these days.

Celeste

I’ve been spending the afternoon reading about women and came back to the V-Day movement, reading about women of the Congo, reading about the women in Haiti, and the girls bought and sold in cities and far-flung nowheres in Asia. I don’t think that I will ever grow an emotional “callus” to hearing these stories and I hope I never do. But something in me has shifted, because before, when I would start to hear women and children’s stories about violence, rape, displacement, etc., I would tune out or leave the room or nod in some kind of solidarity and try to find out more on how I could help or do something. But now I want to listen. Listening is such an integral part in understanding, and developing, and doing.

There are hundreds of vids on YouTube about what’s going on in the Congo and all over the world. I will not choose one over another.

Women for Women International has been eye-opening.

Suggested reading:

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/03/21/margaret.moth.obit/index.html?hpt=C1

(CNN) — Simply put, Margaret Moth made an impression.

Given her jet-black hair, thick black eyeliner, black clothes and combat boots (which she often slept in while on assignment), people didn’t always know what to think upon meeting her. She was quirky, the sort who excused herself from a social gathering by saying she had to wash her socks. And she was fearless, the kind of woman who not only kept the camera rolling while under fire, but zoomed in on a soldier who was shooting at her.

Colleagues learned quickly to appreciate all that this CNN camerawoman was. Beyond her rich personality, which included deep optimism and kindness, she brought to her profession top-notch technical abilities, unmatched dedication and an approach to work that inspired others to push themselves.

Moth sought out, even demanded, assignments in conflict zones. She barely survived being shot in the face in Sarajevo in 1992, only to go back as soon as she was physically able. The multiple reconstructive surgeries that followed, as well as the hepatitis C she contracted from a consequent blood transfusion, were mere obstacles she moved around.

But more than three years after being diagnosed with colon cancer, her tremendous life journey has come to an end.

Moth, known for her gutsiness, striking appearance, distinctive humor and sense of fun, died early Sunday in Rochester, Minnesota. She was 59.

“Dying of cancer, I would have liked to think I’d have gone out with a bit more flair,” she said with a laugh last spring during an interview with a CNN documentary crew that had traveled to Texas, where she was visiting friends.

“The important thing is to know that you’ve lived your life to the fullest,” she said then, before tubing down a river in Austin, Texas; taking jaunts to Cape Cod and the Canadian Rockies; and piloting a houseboat up the Mississippi River — replete with beer and Cuban cigars. “I don’t know anyone who’s enjoyed life more.”
Born Margaret Wilson in Gisborne, New Zealand, to a homemaker and a man who made swimming pools, she got her first camera at age 8. She later changed her name to Margaret Gipsy Moth, a nod to the airplane, which was appropriate for a woman who had a penchant for jumping out of planes, barefoot.

She said she never aspired to be a photojournalist. Rather her path, she explained, was mostly driven by a love of history and her desire to see it unfold firsthand.

Whether she was amid rioters after Indira Gandhi’s assassination or covering a long menu of wars spanning continents, Moth felt she and her colleagues were the lucky ones.

“You could be a billionaire, and you couldn’t pay to do the things we’ve done,” said Moth, who had most recently called Istanbul, Turkey, home.

Reported to be New Zealand’s first camerawoman, she came to the U.S. and worked for KHOU in Houston, Texas, for about seven years before moving to CNN in 1990.

When other photojournalists dived behind cars as militiamen opened fire on protesters in Tbilisi, Georgia, she stood her ground and kept her camera running. As a band of medical professionals defied Israeli tanks and armored vehicles, marching into then-Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat’s compound in the West Bank, she got in the middle of the group, joined them and helped nab an exclusive interview. When many around her slept in Sarajevo, she set to work in a destroyed hotel room, filming with a night scope through holes blown out by artillery fire, hiding herself and camera from the eyes of snipers.

The Serbian sniper bullet that did hit Moth while she was traveling along “sniper alley” in Sarajevo shattered her jaw, blew out her teeth and destroyed a portion of her tongue — which left her forever sounding like she was drunk, she said.

Others got angry, as the van she traveled in was clearly marked as a press vehicle, but she refused to go there.

” ‘We came into their war. Fair’s fair,’ ” former CNN correspondent Stefano Kotsonis, who was with her when she was shot, remembered her saying. ” ‘I don’t blame anyone for firing at me. They’re in a war, and I stepped into it.’ “

Her attitude made other colleagues, many of whom were interviewed for the documentary “Fearless: The Margaret Moth Story,” strive to be better at what they did. Sound techs and correspondents would often follow her lead, whether they felt ready or not. She was known to outrun her own security. Photojournalists viewed her as a bar-setter.

Another of CNN’s international camerawomen remembers Moth

Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s chief international correspondent, who’d been away from Sarajevo when her friend was shot, was sitting at Moth’s hospital bedside when an assignment editor from the international desk called. He wanted to know if Amanpour was ready to return to the conflict zone, she recalled for the documentary about Moth.

“I said I’d go back, and I know to this day that if I hadn’t said yes then, I probably never would have gone back, and I never would have done this career. But I said yes because I couldn’t say no,” Amanpour remembered, fighting back tears. “We did the work for her. We did it because she was our champion, and we wanted to be her champion.”

Sure enough, as soon as Moth could carry a camera again, six months later, she went straight back to Sarajevo to join her CNN colleagues. She joked that she was there to find her teeth.

Moth maintained her humor amid madness and helped others smile and unwind when the surroundings could make levity seem impossible.

She enlisted a producer to go rollerblading with her on the marble floors of a Baghdad, Iraq, hotel lobby. She forced colleagues to tell her who they’d rather sleep with, while giving them horrifying choices. She liked to kick back with fine cigars and could drink others under the table.

Despite her tough exterior, there was insecurity, a vanity to her. No matter where she was, Moth rose early to do her eye makeup and hair. Forever worried about her weight, she picked at a block of cheese in Bosnia for about six weeks and got by on mango juice during a stretch in the West Bank.

She admitted that after being shot, she was more afraid of what she’d look like than she was of dying. Enveloped in bandages, she slipped her dear friend Joe Duran a note asking him if she looked like a monster.

But she often worried about others more than herself.

Moth enjoyed working with seasoned correspondents but also looked out for those who were new. In Pakistan, she taught Patty Sabga to sleep behind couches and talked her through everything she was shooting to help Sabga build her stories. And in Afghanistan, she carefully led the former CNN correspondent through rubble that probably hid land mines.

“She took such incredible care of me and taught me so much,” Sabga said. “I can honestly say that the work I did with Margaret Moth is still the very best work of my career.”

Moth repeatedly visited the doctor who saved her life. And she boosted the spirits and changed the attitude of another CNN photojournalist, David Allbritton, when he was seriously injured by a bomb in Sarajevo in 1995.

“She made me realize that I was going to get through this,” he said. “She set an example by overcoming everything that’s happened to her. … I took that example, and I’m shooting today. I’m not sure that I would be doing what I’m doing today if it had not been for Margaret Moth.”

Her chosen lifestyle didn’t leave room for children of her own, but she bonded with them across the globe. And her love of animals was so deep that she refused to ride in a horse-pulled wagon, preferring to run with heavy equipment in the desert heat while on assignment in Petra, Jordan.

In fact, when it became clear that the advanced cancer would end her life, the concern that drove her to tears was her cats — the more than 25 strays she looked after in Istanbul.

“She was more upset about them than she was about dying,” said Duran, who rushed to her side after she’d been medevaced out of Sarajevo. But when Duran, also a CNN cameraman, moved into her home in Turkey with the promise that he’d care for the cats, he said Moth told him, ” ‘Now I can die happy.’ “

Duran was by Moth’s side when she died. He said he will be taking her ashes back to Istanbul, where he will place them in her garden, beside a photograph of her. There, as she wanted, she’ll be able to hang out with her cats.

There were a few things Moth wished she had done. She would have liked to have seen the Krak des Chevaliers, a medieval fortress in Syria, and the Burundi drummers. But regrets? She had none.

She “led the complete life,” Amanpour said. “I don’t think Margaret could ever look back and say, ‘What if?’ She did it to the max, and she did it brilliantly. And she did it on her terms.”

“The idea that women should be clean and small and mutable really speaks to me of the power they must have. Women are fleshy, walking, talking, human-making machines, and all things fertile are also dirty, bloody, and open. There is no privacy in womanhood, and that idea is not always an easy thing to deal with.”

Haitian women become crime targets after quake

The article also does explain the “consensual” bit pretty well. All abusers have a tremendous amount of power over the child victim, but this power is even more pronounced when the perpetrator is a parent. When you’re a kid, your parents are where the world begins and ends in a way. They are law, completely. In knowing this, I think, parent perpetrators really flex this power in making the child do as they are told, and hence making the child feel as if they are “agreeing” to what is going on. This is something that becomes so deeply ingrained it takes a very long time to realize and accept, that this isn’t true at all.

Over the years during which I was being raped by my father, there was very little I could say or do in way of resistance. Everything started when I was very small. As I got older, I knew that what was going on was incredibly wrong, somehow, but it was something that had to be done. It didn’t seem “normal” as much as it did necessary. Commonplace in the house. Like the dishes or the laundry or the dusting.

I didn’t think everyone else did this with their parent. I was once in a support group where a woman said she grew up thinking everyone had sex with their fathers. It was an interesting take on how the child-mind can rationalize such brutal events, especially with such a sad and tormented undercurrent of love. “Daddy isn’t hurting me. This is just normal. Everyone does it. It’s alright.” Anything to believe that the parent — Daddy, the god-law — isn’t a bad person.

Of course, many of us grow to know that it’s wrong. Many, but not all, come to accept that these things were not agreed to, and that we were innocent, and that our perpetrators were sick people. Too many, however, never get to know these things. And become slaves, in a way, to the past via emotion. Mistreatment, unfairness, abuse, and a myriad of other things are sought after in adult life because this was the road that was paved as children. This, is what is normal. Some never even realize it. Others are too afraid to question another take on life, especially one of “freedom”. Freedom implies responsibility and reclaiming oneself. An uphill battle, when one has this anvil of a past attached to one’s foot. But it is so very well worth it.

There is so much to life, so much goodness to life, than one often imagines is possible. But it is there. And happily waiting to greet you with love and reuniting you with the fortune of accepting and loving yourself.

Should you need resources for yourself or someone you know on support for dealing with the effects of incest, visit Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website and/or call their hotline: 800-656-HOPE.

This is her now:

According to yet another badly written Yahoo! article on the change, the new image wants to be used in new product advertisements yet they want to keep the original “homely” girl the same too. The new version would do the things modern women do, like, grocery shopping. And going to the gym. And speaking foreign languages. What?

Yes among the 50,000 other things we usually have to do every day too. If you really want to use the cover of your box to promote health and nutrition, swap it around and put a “healthy guy” on it. Ah but men are seldom pictures of health and radiance right? Or don’t put anyone on it at all, since the selection will invariably be a thin white person of varying hair colors. Give your nutritional contents and that’s it. Because at this point, stereotypes aside, I haven’t learned a thing about how this box of raisins can help me make a healthier choice. The more I look at ads, more than I have in the past when I worked in advertising, and did ad analysis for classes in school, I see just really how far the rabbit hole goes on this “media fact”: skinny and big tits will always be healthy. No matter how you get there.

May be I’m analyzing this too far. I do that. But really. What do you think?