Tired, and so many things left to work on. Need to study for work stuff before I go to bed; want to goof off. Want to call a friend. Want a hug. Dishes, laundry, lawn needs mowing, haven't made any progress on the driveway for days, bloggy things I need to write, various portions of my house direly need cleaning, sleep--all of this feels pressing.

What I have done today: made a new friend, confronted my therapist, wrote in my journal, read two chapters of a trashy vampire story, slept when my back hurt, went on a long walk, thought about life, slow gentle yoga. And now this. Priorities, priorities.

But, I feel OK. This is what it's all for?

I'm angry at the world about a roof.

My house needs a roof. I want a metal roof. It would last three times as long and be completely recyclable, and it costs two thousand dollars more. I don't have it. In order to get a metal roof, I would, basically, have to not spend money on anything for the next several months.

It's the small things, yeah? There's no reason I shouldn't have clothes that fit me and don't have holes in them, and buy fresh groceries, and own shoes that don't hurt to walk in, and have access to a swimming pool so that I can exercise on the days that hurt the most. I discover, this is a startlingly big part of taking care of myself--prioritizing my material needs. I hate that, to take care of myself now, there must be such a waste of resources--that to make it through one summer entails such a throwaway, a cheap and wasteful decision that will last fifteen years.

I'm not giving up, of course--creative and resourceful money management is in my brain and blood. Waste angers me.

This

http://blip.tv/file/3122155/

is a great intro to the idea of "the essential subject" and "the other"--which, I should mention, is the most applicable-in-my-own-life bit of philosophy I've yet encountered.

I should also mention that I think the clip provides a really interesting example of something that may be hypocrisy--I find myself critical and sympathetic. The piece critiques something foundational to current gender construction, and at the same time uses current gender construction (maybe ironically, but functionally as well) to market itself. You can see this in the visual storytelling; the visual and comedic style constantly stops you and says, "Look! Pretty girl! Pay attention." Whether that undermines it's broader message or not (I think it does) is an interesting question.

drive and happiness

The problem might be: I associate my drive to change the world for the better with the poor condition of my own life. Not in all ways, of course--I would be fine with having a blockbuster academic career filled out with various sorts of social activism--as long as I wasn't happy.

I value my drive to change the world for the better. There's something terrible about the norm of acceptance; accept the genocides, the lies, the general unpardonable suffering of other human beings. Accept because they aren't here, and potential solutions are complicated. It's true that there's no social pressure to say these things are alright, but to be normal is to do nothing, or to do only what is comfortable--and, to condemn the norm is called unreasonable.

It doesn't seem like it would be possible to be happy without cutting yourself off from the incredible amount of pain that goes on in the world. It seems like you'd have to stop seeing all those people, who constantly hurt, as people. I'm afraid of being the norm; I feel that when I put resources into things that make me happy, they could be going to something better. I feel that when I'm happy I'm complacent. I feel that when I'm happy I'll start being part of the problem instead of part of the solution.

I miss my feet.

Dancer's feet are important, strong. When you dance you feel your feet, know exactly where they are. Foundation for everything, they can be more expressive than your hands or face. Lately, I've been walking a lot, and I feel them differently, torqued and sore from all directions, jelly, mush. They are overworked to stabilize my unconditioned stride.


Sometime 'round the end of January, a Very Awesome Friend invited me to hike to the Havasupai falls with his family in June. I was pretty thrilled at the chance; it seemed perfect in several ways. First, for all my cavorting about the country, I've never been to the Grand Canyon, and I'd wanted to see it this summer. Second, I've wanted to take up backpacking for half a decade now, but things keep interfering. Third, this particular Very Awesome Friend also has a Very Awesome Family, and who wouldn't jump at the chance to observe such a thing so close to it's natural habitat?

Initially, I was bummed. After the thirty seconds of jubilation, I remembered that I have a mutineer spine, and ten incredibly steep miles with a pack on seemed both unlikely and not bright. After several days of moping, I came to a compromise: I'd set up a training program and at least try. If I got injured along the way, I'd find a shorter more local hike to do and invite friends for a "celebration of failure" party.

Thus it came to pass that I abandoned the cautious exercise program I'd been, with so much self restraint, following for the past month and a half. I traded it in for the aggressive sort that falls somewhere in that gray and shadowed land between "unwise" and "categorically stupid."

It was going really well till Monday. I'd done a 13 miler on Friday at an incline setting of 5 (my commercial grade treadmill goes to 15). Then I'd had a really hard time sleeping for a couple of nights, and woke up hurting on Monday. . . then I planted a tree. And THEN I hiked another six miles. It was after the six miler, doing a careless/stupid forward-bend hamstring stretch, that the moment came.

Have you ever watched a potter use a wire cutter to take a vase off the wheel? It's a bit like that. All the pieces are intact, but something has definitely just shifted a bit sideways. The pain is sharp across that line, but also aching everywhere else. As you try to move a little in the moments afterwards there are hints and flashes that if you do something wrong, it will soon be shattering. You hold yourself up with your arms and you try to breathe, try to tense your core muscles, try to will them into putting whatever it was back.

It turned out not to be too bad. Definitely not another herniated disc; I can walk with ease. Still, the whole incident has been a reminder; dear self, this is what it's like to live in a body that can't be whole. It is more fun to ignore this, to try to forget this body is heavy and slow and weak, the kind that will give out on you indiscriminately, at seven o'clock on a Tuesday or five minutes before the biggest show of your life. Ultimately this is all human bodies, all of us, and it makes us nervous to know this something we'd rather forget. Some days I get lessons in remembering, and this is what I've learned.

It feels way better to get hurt doing something hard than washing your dishes or tying your shoe.

It feels weird to be able to walk thirteen miles up hill, then not to be able to tie your shoe four days later.

It feels weird to walk thirteen miles up hill, and not to dance.


I'm reminded of my college PE teacher, kindred spirit; as he put it, yeah, I know this isn't some kind of promise. Maybe I'll still die young, I could drop dead tomorrow of a heart attack or a stroke. . . but no matter what, I will die running.

I will die running.

Purity

is one of the most common measures of morality; it's about cultivating virtue and keeping out the things that don't belong. Among liberals and leftists it is often manifested through food. Veganism is not for everybody--only for the virtuous, those who care about ethics, those who are willing to sacrifice. Eating local, organic, produce and excluding whatever is ethically dubious will make you skinny and healthy and. . . virtuous. Right?

Maybe. If one is concerned with animal welfare and the environment, having a lifestyle that supports that is a spectrum, not a step, and it isn't just food. As humans in the first world, virtually everything we do has a detrimental environmental impact. How does your veggie burger hold up against your refusal to take the bus? The clothes you bought new at Wal-mart? Your soap from the dollar store? Do you know what oilfield your 100% vegan fleece came from? Is it really better, just because the bodies of the dead are rotting in the Niger delta instead of marinating in tariyaki sauce?

I don't mean to belittle the efforts of really dedicated environmentalist vegans. They have my admiration and support. I also don't mean to imply at all that any effort which doesn't cover everything isn't worthwhile. I even believe in being vocal about your ethical choices, and I want people to hold each other (socially) to a high ethical standard with regards to environmentalism.

My beef with this comes in when people think it's ok to try to invoke other people's sense of purity. Moral reasoning, I'm fine with. If you want to stop me from eating meat because of justice--because by eating it I'm doing harm to people and creatures who deserve no violence from me--I am absolutely fine with that. However, I'd rather have vegetarianism forced on me by violence than have people appropriate my understanding of virtue to get me to adopt it on my own.

When we disagree about what priorities are appropriate for the wider society to accept, that effects me but it is not an attack on my identity. When it comes to individual choices, there is only person one who should be allowed to decide what belongs in me--in my body, in my ethics--and what does not. This person is me. If I adopt an ethical standard based on selfish and inconsistent hedonism, as an individual you can think less of me, and as a citizen you can help enact laws that curb my outward behavior--and that's all.

I feel very strongly that trouble comes when outsiders try to arbitrate an individual's sense of purity. Religious readers might disagree with this, but I see this as a major problem in religious practice. When the emotional and ethical development process have not taken place for a teenager to reject pornography of their own accord, based on their own moral foundation, others will often attempt to impose this conclusion socially. The result is a massive cycle of guilt and shame. I don't know if it works or not, but guilt is an ugly motivator--and when allowed to fester and spiral into something huge, it does terrible damage to the person experiencing it.

The thing to be avoided is manipulation--projecting your values over someone else's, or usurping their values so that they will act in support of your preferences.

Besides its modern incarnation, there's a very long spiritual tradition of using food to establish or symbolize moral superiority, using purity. My first bout with severely disordered eating was triggered--after many other things had been set in place--by a sacrament meeting devoted to how fasting can make you pure. You don't stop eating because of things you think; you do it because of things you feel. You do it because you want to feel pure and you don't feel like you deserve to live. When you associate purity with restricting food, you can get a double dose of self-destructive relief from one tragic course of action.

When others try to appropriate my sense of purity for their cause, I get defensive quickly. The idea that veganism isn't for everybody--only for the virtuous--pushes all the wrong buttons. I like to see myself as virtuous. I like to feel myself as pure. I enjoyed exercising for seven hours a day on a 1200 calorie, mostly-vegetable diet, and it makes me angry that people who were supposed to be my friends encouraged me to do so.

I think in dealing with these questions it's terribly important to get in touch with your own sense of virtue, your own sense of purity, your own moral reasoning--and to get in touch with your own judgmental side. Saying "I think you are in the wrong" makes it much clearer whose values are whose than saying "you could be pure if you were like me."



Someday, when there are less triggers associated with it, I'd like to become vegan with the exception of
a) foods I've raised myself humanely, and
b) significant cultural and culinary experiences.

I want to eat at the French Laundry, learn to make a spectacular saag paneer, and taste peeking duck when I'm in China. These moments will not come often, and I choose not to miss them.

My values lead me to think a lot about the ways my time and money impact other people and creatures, but they also lead me to assert my own claim to a rich and full existence. I am willing to take a stand for the things I care about. I am willing to make sacrifices, and I care passionately about changing the world for the better. I am not, and do not plan to be, vegetarian or vegan. This is what I believe about the purity and virtue of the way I eat.

Emo can't sleep post. Hmn.

I used to love the sound of rain, but this morning it sounds like failure and I absolutely can not sleep.

Here is my confession; I miss living in a trailer in my sister's driveway. The trailer was safe because it was mine, and it was mine because no one else wanted it. No one expected it to be nice, and no one was counting on me. I could--and did--jerry rig all kinds of sub-standard solutions when things went wrong, and it was all ok. It was satisfying; I could listen to the rain. I could dance in it. No one was counting on me, and through my own labor I had privacy, a place to sleep, my guitars were safe, my books were dry.

I've been thinking lately of getting a tattoo, solely for my own benefit. It would a have to be somewhere I could see it, and I've been thinking about some words, simple script, across my left wrist--work harder. I find it deeply appealing, and yet somehow it betrays, even to me, that there's something broken about me, something unbalanced. In my mind I see another word, "peace," across my right wrist so they will weigh the same, but it's harder to believe.

A house can't be really mine. It's worth something. There's too much of it, and by justice it must be shared. This house has weathered 80 years, and if the foundation becomes unsettled I can't solve it by moving around some bricks. I can't use an old dog leash to tie down a tarp and stop the leaking of the roof; I can't cover the windows with duct tape and cardboard and stuff them with grocery bags when I am cold. If I fail, I will have broken something whole, and betrayed the resources trusted to me.

I used to love the rain.

the social cost of financial responsibility

Lately I've been reading Amy Dacyczyn's The Complete Tightwad Gazette, which is a compendium (nearly a thousand pages) of advice on saving money. The suggestions range from obvious to extreme, but I find it generally useful. For example, she points out (and expounds upon the fact, pp.42-43) that there are three ways to save money on something; you can buy it cheaper, make it last longer, or use it less. Another example is this tidy and useful summary of the principles (her word) of frugality, from an article on pp. 64-66:

1) Record Spending
2) Regardless of your income, do not spend everything you earn
3) Use creativity and thrift to improve the quality of life, rather than spending more money
4) Avoid convenience foods and instead prepare from scratch
5) Buy in bulk
6) All family members should develop hobbies that save money, rather than ones that are non-productive or cost money*
7) Whenever possible reuse materials you already have rather than buying new at shops
8) Don't try to keep up with the Joneses; instead live within your means

She elaborates on each of these throughout the book, and as far as I can tell she's covered all the major bases except two--try to avoid rent, and don't let anything (rebates, vegetables, surprisingly many other things) go bad on you. So far so good, no?

Now that you have the general gist of the book, we can move on to the hard part. What is the right thing to do about social spending?


You're aware of the situation, I'm sure; old friends who you haven't seen in years or new ones you're very interested in knowing suggest a dinner out. If you've been resigned to overspending, this may come in stride, but if--like me--you're on a strong frugal streak, it presents a dilemma.

Ultimately thrift should be about being aware of how you expend your resources, and using that awareness to direct them to the things you value most. Generally I believe very strongly in behaving--insofar as such a thing is possible--as if things are less important than people. I really love dining out, but at times when my money can be put to really, really, really rewarding use elsewhere, social comfort is about the only thing that can compel me to do it.

Dacyczyn would call this "Keeping up with the Jonses." In fact, the quote (from an 1833 manual called The American Frugal Housewife) she uses to illustrate "Keeping up with the Jonses" is this:

"To associate with influential and genteel people with an appearance of equality unquestionably has its advantages, but like other external advantages, these may have their proper price, and may be bought too dearly. Self denial, in proportion to the narrowness of your income, will eventually become the happiest and most respectable course for you and yours."

The problem is, it's not a simple matter of individualistically renouncing consumerism or giving up ostentation. Social spending is about making other people comfortable, or about holding a certain position--and not necessarily a dominant one--in the social sphere, a sphere that is just as much about relationships as about consumption. If you don't have a place to entertain, it's the cost of creating a comfortable space in which to connect with people. As someone who never pays more than 10$ for an outfit and balks at a 5$ garlic press (which I'd use constantly), a hundred dollars or more a month on gifts and other social spending often seems an eminently worthwhile use of funds.

It is likely, of course, that the friends in question are not much more "influential and genteel" than myself, but merely have different priorities, or are less aware of their resource use. . . and this brings me to my main conclusion; I think it would be nice to foster a culture where social spending is not so obligatory. Let's encourage the use (and existence) of public social spaces and events, and bring back picnicking and home cooking. After all, the less time we spend on earning money to spend time with each other, the more time we have to spend with each other.



*I actually disagree with this one--what is money for, if not life? Just make sure what you do is worth it to you.

not a drop

I've just watched this documentary, called A World Without Water, which seems to have been recorded off of British television almost commercial free.

In case any of you didn't know, over the past fifteen months or so, I've watched several hundred documentaries. This is in my top ten. To be fair, this is the first I've seen that dealt exclusively with the global water crisis, which is pretty compelling material. Still, even if there is a better version of it out there, this is. . . well. . . compelling.

I think the most interesting thing about it is how it neatly skirts the basic ideas of economics, sort of grazing them as it passes by. It abandons them in favor of a foundational assumption which it never quite articulates, but which, I think, lies near the center of a lot of controversy.

That assumption? That we both can and should make a moral choice to maintain certain things outside the reach of the market. In itself this is not a controversial idea, at least in most quarters. Outright chattel slavery is perhaps the clearest example; as a culture we seem to have come to the conclusion that it's not OK to legally own each other, no matter how profitable it might be or how much it might benefit the common good.

The case this film makes, then, is that water should fall in that same category--that as a matter of human decency, it should not be so commodified.

I'd have liked to see more about how the river privatization "irrigation schemes" had been "fabulously successful" in Africa, and otherwise heard more about the other side, but however biased, this is really an interesting and thought-provoking film.

If you're looking for a particularly striking/thought-provoking experience, do as I did and watch it right after the first part of Spike Lee's When The Levees Broke, an exceptionally well crafted telling of the Katrina disaster. Between them they do wonders in broadening one's perspectives on water.

compost as housekeeping

It is possible that somebody out there has been wondering how my gardening adventures have resolved themselves.

Everything has died.


My definition of housekeeping is: mastery of the things that are how, not what.

My interest in gardening is about how I want to eat--healthy, and with deep understanding and awareness. For the most part, we all have to eat--and wash dishes, do laundry, sleep, clean up. It's whether we wash the dishes every meal or every week that determines housekeeping styles.

It seems to me that having at least a little gardening in one's life is rather like clearing up after every meal--and like using a journal to sort out your thoughts before going and screaming at someone, and like bothering to take a half an hour calming down with your favorite Bach recordings before going completely insane, and like managing your time so that you actually do the things you actually wanted to have done. You know, housekeeping.


Everything having died, I've moved on to the logical next step; compost.

After weeks of exhaustive study and consideration, I've devised a magical and well informed bucket-based system that will (hopefully)lead to successful and convenient composting. Pouring from one bucket to the next will serve to turn it; black plastic sheeting will increase temperature to speed the decomposition process, and if I have to go buy bailed hay, I will get the carbon/nitrogen ratio right so the damn thing doesn't stink.

After all, we all have to throw our kitchen scraps somewhere.