natalia ilyin

I am a woman of many hats.

Many people content themselves with a owning a business hat and a personal hat, changing from one to the other in a fairly regulated way. But my hat tree is loaded, and their wearing is not a daily routine. Upon said tree hang the branding hat, the design critic hat, the trade-book memoirist hat, the business-owner hat and the nonprofit refugee relief co-director hat.

Aside from the business-owner hat (a large Fedora, suitable for dodging bullets in a film noir alley, which I wear daily) the rest find their places upon my head seasonally.

Like many writers, I prefer to write in the Winter, when it is cold, and publish and tour in the Spring, when it is warm and I can fly without dragging along a big coat. The fact that I don’t actually tour two out of three years does not keep me from thinking that I will and planning accordingly. If you write, this makes total sense to you. If you do not write, this will explain why perhaps you should not take up the profession.

Anyway. I wore my writer’s hat for a time a few weeks ago, but now suddenly I must also don my nonprofit co-director hat and throw a large fundraising extravaganza. Putting a sensible, ladies-who-lunch pillbox on top of a Fedora may look strange but, hey. Of such is life.

Eight years ago now, a friend of mine and I started a very small refugee-relief program. We do one thing. We give micro-grants to stateless Burmese who have been pushed over the border into Thailand. Since it’s not in Thailand’s interest to acknowledge the fact that huge numbers of people have fled the military dictatorship in Burma, in Thailand these people are “non-people,” have no papers, and therefore do not have access to healthcare or any other basics of citizenship.

The Thai tolerate their squatting on the border, and provide camps for some them, which is a strain on the Thai economy, but not as much of a strain as a confrontation with Burma would be. So things are rough for these refugees. Many don’t know where their parents are, where their kids are.

For years, my friend came back from her stays in Thailand, wondering aloud how we could help these women up there on the Border who were giving people medical care, or creating orphanages, or helping homeless kids during the day.

At the same time she’d often say— “Oh, and here’s a scarf from the markets in Bangkok,” and I’d tie some gorgeous piece of silk around my neck and continue wondering what we could do to help these women with projects they had started up.

It took us a long while to put two and two together-- to figure out that we could sell these Thai scarves in America and put 100% of the proceeds into micro-grant programs. But that’s what we did: We started SisterScarf. (Sister is a term of endearment used for close friends in the Cambodian. It seemed appropriate.)

We sell scarves. We have a couple of angel donors. And we throw a big bash once every two years, just to blow the carbon out of the engine.
No, we do not have a website, we’re not on Facebook. We do not want the Burmese government to be able to trace blog entries or any of our services to any of our recipients. (That’s how they cracked down on the uprising last year. They tracked blog entries, picked up everyone who had complained, and threw them in prison. Security equals safety for our recipients. More important than we Americans remember to think.)

So all this to say, I am balancing my co-director hat on top of all other hats and am in the throes of preparing for the fabulous Old Settlers’ Ball, our fundraiser, to be held Saturday, April 25th, at the Island Center Hall on Bainbridge Island. (Email me for an invitation, it is private and there won’t be any announcements of it. Email pronto because it sells out.)

Why, you ask, is it called the Old Settlers’ Ball? Why, you ask, is it a costume party a la 1870’s at which the women wear vintagey ball dresses and the men look like all those good-looking Riverboat toughs in HBO’s Deadwood? Why not just have an auction and drive up the bids for blown glass bowls and expensive cakes while people eat your salmon, chicken or vegetarian entrées?

Because I hate auctions. I am forced to attend them for various friends’ nonprofits, but I find them teeth-meltingly dull. So why should I host one? Instead, we do something that involves eating desserts, dancing to the sounds of fiddles and mandolins, yakking with friends, and just generally retiring the fleece for one night and stepping back into a time that may not have been easier, but was certainly more rustling, given all the taffeta.

Why do we call it the Old Settlers’ Ball? Because there’s a well-known folk song around these Northwestern parts that is called “The Old Settler's Song.”
(http://sniff.numachi.com/pages/tiOLDSETLR;ttROSINBOW.html) It’s about a guy who went up to Alaska to seek his fortune in the gold rush, but through various travails made no money, got to feeling lower and lower, and finally, in his misery, happened upon an island in the Puget Sound, where “surrounded by acres of clams,” he realized that he had found the perfect life. I can relate. And so can many here. So email me for details and come to the Ball. Cinderella has nothing on you.

Lordy. We've been having some busy days at EmersonHarris. The kinds of days that include coming back from a meeting, sitting down to deal with stuff and awakening a few hours later to the fact that you are still wearing your coat and scarf.

Anyway. Two things.

One: http://www.yourlogomakesmebarf.com/
Just to remind us that we are actually in the aesthetics business. A contribution from Mr. Goryeb.

Two: Would you rather hear about what exactly makes me crazy in the wording of the emails that people who are looking for work are sending me-- Natalia's grammar and cliche do's and don'ts; or would you rather hear about the pathetic state of current 30 year-old women's self esteem as estimated by their responses to an invitation.
Which one? You tell me.

Ok. I admit it. I went away to write on my current manuscript. To a place with trees and birds and water and no phone. A dock for walking on. Small creek running by. Away from the business for a few days. No “ I’ll write later because I need to work on these people’s branding program.” No,“ I’ll just do this load of laundry." Just me and my writing sister in a cabin with trees and birds.

Two things were made clear to me at this cabin. First, while I wasn’t noticing, American TV screens quadrupled in size and now hang like huge black bats in the corners of otherwise cottagey rooms.

Second. Coffee-making apparatus inflated along with the American economy in the last few years. An enormous Melitta stainless steel vat with stainless steel carafe turned out only to house 10 cups of coffee. Huge. Looked like a portable missile silo. Many LED this's and that's. The most over-designed piece of American ridiculity I have seen since buying a dryer.

Fun facts: A lip on the carafe made it impossible for a left-handed person to pour water into the tiny aperture on the right side of the water silo. Once plugged in, with water heater sucking energy from the wall and filter dripping determinedly, the little drip-stop thingy got hung up and coffee spread in a big puddle over the granite counter. Three times. After that my sister got out her little plastic filter holder and we heated water on the stove. Easier. Quicker. Less prone to accident.

The coffee silo was bad, but the Mr. Coffee coffee-grinder was somehow worse. Huge. Plastic. A coffee grinder with programmable features. Seriously. A delay-grind feature? Who is going to fill the grinder the night before and have it grind at a pre-set time? It’s RIDICULOUS.

I, of design background—I, who have given advice to innovations engineers about gizmos many a time—I….well…I couldn’t figure out how to open this coffee grinder. Neither could my sister. Programmable features gave no clue. No instructions. Twisting only removed plastic grinder from housing. We both took turns fighting that big plastic coffee grinder. Separately, we took it on and grunted in silent combat. Both of us tried and both of us failed, surrounded by creek-gurgle and trees.