500 years of women

(Aphrodite)

This is an amazing display of 500 years of women in Western art. It’s incredible! And what I found extremely interesting was the variety of ‘feminine’ expressions captured through the ages.
500 Years of Women in Western Art.

A full list of the paintings.

mft #5: Balthazar

I’ve been to Paris twice, and fell in love with it twice. And to me, with its frosted glass, crowded but cheerful atmosphere, Balthazar is my escape back there without leaving Manhattan.

Not to mention, the food is delicious. I’ve had all of their skate/cod/trout/bass entrees and liked each of them, although my absolute favorite is their Plateaux de Fruits de Mer, a 3-tier display of raw seafood (clams, oysters, shrimp, king crab, scallop, etc) on ice – just the presentation of the dish itself is impressive.

To be honest, I’ve found better French food elsewhere. And the need to make reservations a week ahead of time annoys me. But the ability of the restaurant, with its friendly waiters, to so accurately recreate the summer days spent at those Parisian brasseries and bistros makes the inconveniences well worth it, time after time. after time. This is consistently one of my favorite restaurants these past few years, and I can’t imagine life without it.

you can find it at: 80 Spring St., New York, NY 10012 (closest subway is 6 train to Spring St.). Balthazar Bakery is right next door, although their delicious goodness is shipped daily to many cafes, etc. around the city.

caught in a labyrinth

I just came across an interesting article in this September’s edition of Harvard Business Review on women’s leadership in the corporate ladder, Women and the Labyrinth of Leadership.

Authors Alice Eagly and Linda Carli visualize the scarcity of female leadership in executive positions not as the conventional “ceiling,” but as a maze with winding paths and obstacles, where it is possible to reach the end, but only if you can figure out the right combination of turns. Specifically, the idea of a glass ceiling suggests that there is an actual point, or level, after which it becomes significantly difficult for women to advance. The authors argue that there are actually walls all around, where the entire passage “requires persistence, awareness of one’s progress, and careful analysis of the puzzles that lie ahead.”

Particularly, the article pinpoints several key barriers to leadership:

• Prejudice – nothing new, given the exact same job, with identical previous education/experience, women still make about 20-25% less than men
• Resistance to female leadership – qualities of leadership tend to clash when it comes to women. Between the two types, there’s “communal,” which is associated with being compassionate, friendly, kind, sympathetic, and there’s “agentic,” which is more aggressive, ambitious, dominant, and forceful. Women who are “communal” are not seen as leaders. But those who are “agentic” end up being labeled as control freaks. Whereas, when it comes to men, “agentic” qualities are seen to be normal, and “communal” qualities in men are greatly praised. Doesn’t seem to work out for women no matter which way they lean.
• Demands of family life - although there’s no surprise here, I was shocked to learn that men and women are actually increasing the number of hours they spend with housekeeping. “Married mothers increased their hours per week from 10.6 in 1965 to 12.9 in 2000, and married fathers increased theirs from 2.6 to 6.5″
• Underinvestment in social capital – Especially in the corporate world, much of one’s career advancement depends on the social networks. “Fast track managers spent relatively more time and effort socializing, politicking, and interacting with outsiders… and did not give much time or attention to the traditional management activities of planning, decision making, and controlling.” Women fall behind on this front – not only because of family responsibilities after work, but also because even in modern companies, networking (on the executive level) involves masculine activities…such as quail hunting (ha!)

Some more startling statistics:

• In the States, even though 40% of managerial positions are occupied by women, only 6% of C-level representation comes from women!
• Only 2% of CEOs in the States are women
• Just 1% (seven companies) of Fortune’s Global 500 have female CEOs.

Al Gore is a genius

I can’t believe Al Gore actually won the Nobel Peace Prize. Correct me if I’m wrong, but all he has done is fly around in his jet to feed biased statistics to the masses. Oh right, and he made a movie with highly skewed facts, so skewed in fact, that a London judge ruled that the film contained major errors that it should not be shown in schools as a documentary, and that it was “politically partisan, containing serious scientific inaccuracies and ’sentimental mush’.”

There needs to be boundaries to these things. The Inconvenient Truth won an Oscar, which is more fitting an award. But the Peace Prize?! Can he really be lined next to Mandela? the Dalai Lama? Mother Theresa?! What has Al Gore done to bring peace to the world? The award should clearly have been given to George W for bringing peace to the Middle East.

Wow. After a failed presidential campaign, the man went on to win an Oscar AND a Nobel Peace Prize. Now that’s what I call a smart politician.

refresh and reboot

Completely shifting gears to begin another application is harder than I thought – I keep thinking about my previous applications and checking online status.  So I took a full day off of doing absolutely nothing related to school.

As I began doing in-depth research on Haas, I was reminded again of how much I wanted to go to this school – in fact, it was this school that made me even begin thinking about business school…2 years ago. But merely thinking and daydreaming about it was so much easier – now that the application is tangibly in front of me, now that I’m personally talking with Haas students about their experiences, I can’t believe it’s actually happening. And true to my suspicions, the more I research on/hear about the school, the more I feel that I just have to be there. But I have several huge obstacles in my way – I’m a lot younger than their normal admitted pool, and I don’t have spectacular grades, the two things that I think matters to Haas more than they do for many other schools.

Which means, the essays are my only way of communicating to them how much going there means to me, without sounding like a desperate ball of emotions.

Oh boy, another several weeks of being holed up in my room.

semi-submitted

I actually had to take a day off work today to complete it, but I am semi-officially done with my CBS application. “Semi” means that I will stare intently at my inbox and click that darn Submit button right when I get confirmation that my recommender has sent his form (which should be any day/hour now…)

I’ve noticed that people usually apply to 5-8 schools. I’ve chosen only 3, and really only want 2 of them – CBS, or Haas. It’s bi-polar – to match my personality.

After I made my final edits to the app, I got up, and realized that:

- I haven’t gone for a run for over a week

- I haven’t left the house for 2 days

- I haven’t showered in 3 days

- I have a pot belly

I call that extremely dedicated. or extremely disgusting.

who is John Galt?

In a few days will be the 50th anniversary of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, a book that, in a nutshell, pretty much changed the past several years of my life.

For fellow Ayn Rand fans… This is John Galt Speaking.

My copy of the book, complete with highlights, scribbles, and dog-eared pages, go with me where ever I go. To celebrate this day, here are some selected quotes from this incredible peace of art.

“For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.”

“She was twelve years old when she told Eddie Willers that she would run the railroad when they grew up. She was fifteen when it occurred to her for the first time that women did not run railroads and that people might object. To hell with that, she thought—and never worried about it again.”

“An inventor is a man who asks ‘Why?’ of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind.”

“Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.”

“The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive- a definition that invalidates man’s consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. Man’s mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God. Man’s standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond man’s power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith. The purpose of man’s life.is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.”

“Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed? …We want them broken… We’re after power and we mean it… There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt.”

“It is not advisable, James, to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener.”

“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

“An error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.”

“Love is our response to our highest values”