TREND.i.e - BoConcept Furniture Sale

What: BoConcept - 30-70% Furniture Sale
When: Saturday, April 12th from 10am—3pm
Where: BoConcept.com

via racked

Thoughts on Stop-Loss

Call it a breach of contract, involuntary servitude, or a backdoor draft, whatever way you look at it, soldiers are forced to put their lives in danger against their will. The movie Stop-Loss, had failed at the box office, attracting only vets to relive the frightful memories. But it succeeded at telling a real-life story of not only hundreds of thousands of soldiers who were stop-lossed, but of millions suffering from PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) as a result of this horrendous and pointless war.

Stop-Loss, a term applied to contracts across many fields. But in military terms, it means:

“Orders that authorize the military to suspend nearly all discharges, transfers, and retirements, and to retain soldiers at Army’s disposal. As troop strength is strained by activity in Iraq and Afghanistan, thousands of active-duty soldiers and reservists are forced to remain in uniform after fulfilling the terms of their contracts. Many could be sent to Iraq or Afghanistan for second or third tours of combat.” – Boston Globe

Three days after September 11th, and 11 times since, President Bush charged numerous troops back to duty, to avoid an unpopular draft. Either way, Bush is damned if he did, damned that he didn’t.

“The stop-loss policy is wrong; it runs contrary to the concept of the volunteer military set up in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.” – NYTimes

Voice of America (VoA) states that “during the Vietnam War, a soldier only had to do one tour of duty. Soldiers today are sometimes sent back for three or four tours. So they're subjected to multiple threats to their livelihood.”

Something that the movie describes all too well, is the state of the soldiers returning from deployment, adjusting to civilian life, starting life from scratch because their services don’t translate well to cubicle environment. Some continue to sleep with their fan on, as they did in the bunkers to muffle the noise of bombs and helicopters, some react as drastically as they were taught, kill or be killed, and some lose perception of reality altogether.

VoA also adds that as a result of PTSD we’ll “see an explosion of domestic violence, homelessness, substance abuse, because there are no resources to take care of these soldiers when they come home. It's just not there."

Anyway, check out the movie Stop-Loss and see if you agree with the reviews:

Rolling Stone
Here's the first major movie of the new year that touches greatness, and damn if there isn't a curse hanging over it.

TIME Magazine
As a nation, we owe them more than they owe us -- as this painfully necessary and heartfelt movie makes abundantly clear.

Detroit News
There's a keen and ugly sense of anguish to Stop-Loss, a caged sense of powerlessness beyond political outrage that makes this film far and away the most effective effort yet at capturing the frustration of the war in Iraq.

New Yorker
Stop-Loss is not a great movie, but it’s forceful, effective, and alive, with the raw, mixed-up emotions produced by an endless war -- a time when the patriotism of military families is in danger of being exploited beyond endurance.

NEWS.i.e. Esquire's 6 Steps to Better Sleep

If you get less than six hours of sleep a night, you're in trouble. You need sleep more than you need food. When you're always tired, you actually age faster than you should. Here is your new nightly routine. Sleep tight:

1. * Dim the lights an hour before bedtime. This mimics sunset. Smack in the middle of your brain is something called the pineal gland. It releases melatonin, the hormone that readies the mind and body for sleep in response to lowered light levels.
2. * If you've got things on your mind -- tomorrow's meetings, errands, that kind of thing -- write them down fifteen minutes before bed. This sweeps them out of your mind.
3. * If you're still awake after fifteen minutes, get up and do something quiet, like reading a book. No Internet, no TV, no exercise. You have to let your body and mind slow down to be able to slip into sleep. If you just lie there thinking about how you're not sleeping, you'll never sleep.
4. * Wake up at the same time every day. An hour extra on weekends is fine, but if you wake up at seven every morning during the week, then sleep until ten on weekends, you're effectively giving yourself jet lag. Monday morning, you'll feel like you just got off the red-eye from three time zones away.
5. * A little chemical helps once in a while is fine. Not alcohol -- it actually interferes with the normal sleep cycle. But Benadryl or one of the combination OTC painkillers or sleep drugs can give you that little nudge into natural sleep. Just describe your symptoms in detail: From a pharmaceutical perspective, "can't fall asleep" isn't the same as "wake up in the middle of the night."
6. * Sex.

via Esquire
image via Robyn's Nest

Legos for adults: Build your own bookcase

Designers from a Swedish design company, Smånsk, revealed these magnified Legos that stack up into a whimsical bookcase, at the Stockholm Furniture Fair in February. Because it was only a prototype, they are now actively looking for a manufacturer to produce the product and bring into the mainstream. My bets are on IKEA, because the bold colors and fun shapes truly speak to their approach for design. According to Smånsk:

"All parts of the Skew Bookcase are identical. To assemble it you just rotate the parts and place them on top of each other. The identical parts provides easy manufacturing as well."

Skew/Bookcase sketch.

Skew/Team Smånsk. Set design Fredrik Evensen

Photographs by Carl Kleiner

via dezeen

Jersey City: the 6th Borough of NYC

Being a city girl at heart, I never thought I would leave Manhattan once I got there. Well, overpriced shoe box apartments, carrying the dirt into my apt off those filthy streets, lack of closet space, boyfriend's car vandalized to pieces, among many other things, all really made me look at the big picture. So I started looking across the Hudson River. The harbor side of Jersey started to better and better and according to mapquest was just 1 mile away.

I started to explore something affordable in Hoboken and Edgewater, but being that these are the hottest spots of NJ's coast line, I decided, not yet. Mom and I went browsing one day with our hearts set on something clean in Jersey City. I failed to notice how huge it was, and so we circled the car within a cute 2 block radius, right next to the light rail, just to make the commute bearable. Then finding a rent-control, 1000 sq ft loft with NYC views and a walk in close, truly broke the deal and boyfriend, his vandalized car and myself moved into what's now considered the 6th borough of NYC. So you see, you can take the girl out of the city, but you can't take the city away from the girl.

Here's the AM article capturing the best of JC.

Would love to hear your story if you battled the same scenario...