When Freshmen Find Out Midterm Papers Are Due (get EduBirdie.com) #Naruto

Forever wondering if I am contributing to a conversation by using my own experiences or being self centered and rude.

"Most Awful Sleeping Face in Japan" (photos by @mino_ris/via neebus)

savage

I’m thinking about her

Got in the fuckin dream team last night

Stop donating canned goods to food drives: Your corned mutton castoffs are only making things worse

Short of donating pop can tabs to the charity of your choice, it's hard to think of a fundraiser with a lower rate of return

It’s one of Canada’s most cherished holiday practices, and it may also be unwittingly robbing resources from some of Canada’s most important charities.

You’ve seen it at the office. You’ve seen it at the library. You’ve seen it at your kids’ Christmas recital. You’ve seen it championed by police, firefighters and municipal officials.

I’m talking, of course, about donating canned goods to holiday food drives.

Now don’t get me wrong. Donating to charity is a good thing, particularly during the holidays, when many charities budget for yuletide donations. But, the simple rules of economics are begging you: Give money to food banks, rather than food.

Canned goods have a particularly low rate of charitable return. They’re heavy, they’re awkward and they can be extremely difficult to fit into a family’s meal plan. Worst of all, the average consumer is buying their canned goods at four to five times the rock-bottom bulk price that can be obtained by the food bank itself.

That $1 you spent on tuna could have purchased $4 worth of tuna if put in the hands of non-profit employee whose only job is to buy food as cheaply as possible. The savvy buyers at the Calgary Food Bank, for instance, promise that they can stretch $1 into $5.

Probably the worst tragedy of the inefficient food drive is holiday events and theater performances where organizers ask for canned food donations in lieu of selling tickets.

The better option, of course, is to keep selling tickets and donate the box office take to the food bank. By not doing this, these well-meaning organizers are effectively surrendering vast amounts of critically needed grocery money in exchange for heavy cardboard boxes filled with god knows what.

And then there’s the logistical nightmare when these boxes show up at the food bank’s loading dock.

Put yourself in the place of a food bank that has just accepted an anarchic 40 pound box of random food from an office fundraiser. It’s got pie filling, Kraft Dinner, beans, pumpkin and chick peas. All those food items need to be sorted, stored, inventoried and then shoehorned into the food bank’s distribution schedule.

It’s bad form to have low-income families eat nothing but creamed corn until the stocks run dry, so some items move faster than others.  

Consider the Herculean plight of the food bank warehouse manager, and it’s easy to imagine how a particularly unhelpful box of food could end up doing nothing but wasting a bunch of people’s time before it ends up shunted into a dumpster.  

All this has been known for years, and yet the practice continues. There’s a few reasons for this.

First, charities are extremely leery about telling people how to donate. Nothing alienates a good samaritan faster than watching them pull up in a cube van of donated food, only to suggest that “maybe next time they just cut a cheque.” When charities get picky, it’s human for would-be donors to think that they don’t really the need the help that bad.

Second, people don’t trust charities. Charities have particularly fragile brands, and it only takes one or two charitable scandals showing up in someone’s Facebook feed for them to start casting aspersions on our nation’s non-profits.

So, by donating a flat of condensed milk instead of $30, donors feel they are insulating themselves against any unseemly corruption.

This was something seen during the Fort McMurray fires. Many Albertans, leery of seeing monetary donations vanish down some kind of bureaucratic black hole, insisted instead on donating mountains of diapers and toiletries that got wasted..

And lastly, something that is probably the most uncomfortable fact about all this; it doesn’t feel as good to donate money. As much as we like to pretend that charitable giving is a selfless act, a lot of it is driven by the human need to feel special and magnanimous.

And as donations go, it’s much more satisfying to donate a minivan filled with Ragu than to send a $100 e-transfer.

Charities know this, and it’s another reason why they are so hesitant to pooh-pooh canned food drives, despite the extra logistical cost. Non-profits know that people get a buzz from loudly dropping $6 worth of cans into an office hamper, and they’re happy to channel that urge towards something good.

They also know it’s a tougher sell to convince schools and offices to merely pass the hat for the hungry, rather than big photo-worthy gestures like building towers of creamed corn.

So, if you feel your coworkers or students need something spherical and tactile in order to fire their benevolent instints, then by all means hold a food drive, and remind people to stick to the always-needed staples like peanut butter and canned fish.

But if you’re a pragmatist just looking to vanquish as much poverty as possible with your disposable income, suck it up, key in your credit card number and enter the glorious world of anonymous, non-glamourous philanthropy.  

That empty food hamper at your office needn’t be a mark of shame, but a badge of honour.

what are snails even trying to do

I no longer know what subtitles are real.

Correspondence

My 13-year-old sister has a … unique … writing style.

It’s hard to describe. Really, really hard. She speaks in it, too, when she’s just around our family – and then switches back into fluent English when she’s around friends, or writing for a school assignment.

I honestly can’t put words to how surreal it is to have a sibling who codeswitches between English and her own private language. It’s even weirder to be able to do the same thing oneself.

For your bewilderment, I now transcribe in full, verbatim, her latest letter to me. I have not put in any [sic]s because I would need to do it at the end of every single sentence. (I have not actually explicitly asked her permission for this but she would not mind, there’s nothing personal in it.)

August 27, 2017

Dear [Mori],

I hope you enjoy my Elegant Monographed Stationary. It is still raining, it rains and rains and where is Daddy? He runs in the rain Around and Around [local landmark] [drawing] like so. We do not know Why and Wherefore he runs in the rain after all is he a fish? No, he is Not. It is Awfully Elegant isn’t it. Just like me.

We went to see [local body of water] if it was flooding and was it? How would I know you say, I was not there. I will tell you, it was not, lots of water but not SO much.

Now this will be the letter of Painting my Room, like a story. The first part will count for a Preface, it is Setting the Scene we say. First we went to Lowes and got lots of things, we were very efficient, like soldiers, I wanted to say Present Arms About Face Forward March and sing Hark the Herald Angels Sing for a marching song but Daddy said No No No, I do not know why, awfully cruel and repressive. He only said No No No, I said the rest. Then I spackled everything CUCUMBER* that is what it is called, spackle. It means fill up the nail holes with white, like printing you know. [drawing] if you see what I mean. Next I took off the outlet for the Long Wall that one is the one I am starting with Awfully Sorry [drawing] that is me being sorry. Also I took off the light switch but Mommy said no no 1 wall at a time so I must now put it back. Then is the most exciting part of all. We moved the fish tank table, me and Daddy I mean Daddy and I we picked it up, and OFF came the leg. [drawing] You see I am still in Contrite Black. Then I put plastic all along part of the wall and taped it to the wall 1 more picture so you see Very well: [drawing] And Mommy says we can paint the primer the first no rain day, because the windows must be open so I do not perish of the poison. Speaking of poison I ate a peach and the kernel was split open and there was the poisonous part, [Littlest Sister] and I are going to make poison out of it to dip our arrows in.

Also you must tell me All about the teachings and what sorts of things you teach them and teach them to me too. Do you use a “Chalkboard” so to speak? And send their jigs.** You can do it by Skype if that is easier. Mommy is going to get me a silent clock for less tickings when I sleep. Also less tickings in the day. And I am going to write a precis of the homily next week well next time Father [LastName] does it because it is hard to tell what Father [OtherLastName] says and is that fair? It is not. I miss you Elot you must Much tell me all about everything and also you must send me hugs. [Cat] loves you too, send her pettings.

Love,

[Middle Sister]

P. S. I am sending you Tesselating Kitty to be a pet for you.***

* “Cucumber” is the family safeword. (Well, not actually “Cucumber,” but something equally random and silly.)

This developed as a practice when the teenager was a toddler: she liked to play games where people would chase her and tickle her and she would scramble away giggling going “no no no!!”, and would get frustrated if you stopped whenever she said “no,” but would also end up bursting into tears at some point because that time she really meant “no.” So we coined “cucumber” to mean “actually really stop.”

This promptly spread in usage to mean “actually really I promise” in other contexts, used as an adjective or adverb, with an absolute taboo on lying in response. (For instance: “Are you cucumber not upset with me, though?” “Will my nose cucumber get longer if I tell lies?” “Cucumber I do not mind where we go for dinner, so you should pick.”)

The usage here, therefore, means “it really is called ‘spackle,’ I’m not just making up that word (for once).”

** The teenager likes summing up people’s personalities by means of a sort of interpretive dance. (Actually, she’ll describe absolutely anything like that, but people’s personalities especially.) She calls this dance “their jig,” and it’s apparently a sort of Platonic essence of the person. She’ll meet someone and later describe them to me as “her jig was very menacing!”

So when she says “send me their jigs,” she wants me to do interpretive dances to describe my students to her. (She is aware that I will not do this.) Hence the offer of Skype. The fact that Skype is only an option isn’t just her being silly, either – she’s invented a writing system for jigs, and would also accept my transcribing them in that and sending them in my next letter.

*** She’s been designing a name-sign for my desk, featuring a tessellating pattern of cats. She enclosed the stiff card template she made for tracing the cats from, with catlike features sketched onto it.