Author: Beth

  • Going green

    Out of the blue, only weeks before my scheduled retirement from Mercer, where I’ve worked for more than nine years (more on that journey in another post), an old friend asked me to join the Advisory Board for a green energy startup: Grimes CarbonTech. I debated with myself. In 2002 I had a great time…

  • Disillusionment with America

    I returned to New York yesterday after a few days in Paris. This country always looks different from abroad, and people I meet still speak of NYC with a certain awe, expressing their dream to go to visit our chaotic metropolis. But more and more, I hear disgust with the US. We are violent, drug…

  • Lapse in the mainstream

    For years I envied my friends whose lives mapped to the “normal” template, who hit all the appropriate milestones in the appropriate order: learning to walk, starting school, finding a passion – or at least a predilection – starting a career, raising a family, buying a small house, maybe a bigger house, getting older, a…

  • The Sycophant Tax

    I’ve often thought about instituting a sycophant tax on consulting services designed to tell leaders what they want to hear. It’s amazing how many organizations ask for advice but don’t really want to hear it. Not that amazing in a daily life: there are many times when it might be prudent to keep your thoughts…

  • Sunday Morning

    A moment of respite before the helicopters intrude. I started a peaceful Sunday morning with coffee and stretching in the garden. Then a tennis lesson at the Central Park courts. There’s nothing as gratifying as being a beginner at something. Your learning is visible – like filling up a knapsack of new words or gestures…

  • Vacuuming the sidewalk

    For decades, the old mansion has stood empty. Looming there on the corner of West 85th Street and Central Park West, its ground floor windows blurred out by brown paper and painter’s tape. A sign on the basement window warns politely that all who venture near are on camera. But the people who venture near,…

  • West 85th Street

    I moved to this block 26 years ago. February 1, 1997. I saw the place on a frigid January evening. No one had lived in the apartment for many years. The building owners were German and had kept the ground floor flat for themselves. But they had died several years earlier, and their children held…

  • Adventures in corporate

    I used to be a writer. Fiction, theater, bad angsty poetry. For years I wrote every day, and when I look back at my free-written musings, I am surprised to find little nuggets of who I used to be. Vivid and digressive. Sometimes so obsessive it makes me cringe. But real. Then I got a…

  • Bragging & Shaming on LinkedIn

    I just read a post on LinkedIn that made me want to bitch slap the author. The post, titled “I am not responsible for your student debt” goes on to talk about how she went to the Air Force and then went to college (paid for, as many commenters noted, by U.S. taxpayers). I paid…

  • Kiuyu Mbuyuni

    27 September 2009On Friday I made my last trip to Kiuyu Mbuyuni (at least for now), stopping by to talk with the Micheweni District Commissioner and the District Planning Officer on the way. I was escorted by Adi F., who works on the JP5 program for the Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs (MoFEA). I…

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