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I think there’s a reason why I’m so obsessed with the concepts of “million” and “billion”. And I mean a reason besides what I find to be their inherent confusion. I think whenever I talk about that confusion, I don’t get as enthusiastic an agreement from those I’m talking to as I expect to, and thus I am unsatisfied and mention it again sometime.

Here’s the gist: our minds (or at least, most of our minds) can’t comprehend numbers on the order of a million, let alone a billion. Plus, the words rhyme. So when we hear “2 billion dollars is the new pricetag on the Gulf oil spill,” we don’t have any reference point except to say “wow, that’s big!” But we say that whether it’s a million or a billion, so we have little basis to compare them. This inability has an effect on civic engagement, because all federal budget figures are of that magnitude, and if there’s a massive imbalance it’s hard for normal citizens to get that worked up about it. We just don’t see the differences.

So, because I’ve been paying a lot of attention to politics and policy in recent years, I’ve started differentiating between them. And how do I do that? Whenever I see “million” I think, “small”. And “billion” is big. This works for me a little, I think, because when I saw a recent story expressing alarm over something like 9 million dollars wasted in some effort, I thought, “Aha, yes, that’s unfortunate, but in the grand scheme of the federal budget, that’s really a small amount of money.” It feels so weird thinking that, though, because a million dollars is so much money in so many contexts. But this strategy is helping me differentiate a little bit, and I think that’s a good thing.

My dad always used to affect a weird voice and say, “a million here, a million there, and pretty soon we’re talking about real money!” I always thought that was just silliness, but now I see that there are contexts in which it’s actually true. Jeez. The different scales of money in different areas of life gives you vertigo sometimes, doesn’t it?

There’s a whole hullabaloo (and that’s just one relatively respectful article) in the green building community these days about deficiencies in the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) rating system. LEED is the primary rating system in the United States for green buildings of all different kinds, and is pretty comprehensive in its scope, including everything from energy efficiency to indoor air quality, to construction practices, to water use and lumber sources. I did a lot of research into LEED when I was interning at a local green building nonprofit the summer of 2007. While I don’t think LEED is the be-all-and-end-all of green building evaluation, and what matters more than the rating system are the practices, it seems to me that LEED is pretty darn good. I haven’t read the criticisms to any level of thoroughness, but my initial impression is that yes, there are probably ways LEED can improve, but many of the criticism are driven either by developers looking for ways to avoid stringent standards, or by proponents of competing rating systems greedy for the upper hand. That said, I think there are some awesome alternative green building standards, such as PassivHaus. But I don’t think LEED deserves all the heat it’s gotten recently. I’ll probably read more about this in the future, but I bet some of you readers have an interesting perspective on this topic. What do you think?

David Roberts has a list of things to look for to see whether the American Power Act has a chance to pass or not. I trust Roberts a lot, and he’s stumping pretty hard for the bill, so let’s hope it does pass. But no one is very optimistic.

I think it’s a travesty and utterly shameful that the American public is still finger-pointing about the Gulf oil disaster, rather than working hard to change energy policy and end our oil addiction. This climate bill is our best chance to do that, so let’s rally up the excitement about it. We need a cap on carbon now, and the American Power Act is the way to achieve it.

Today I embark on a week with no internet. That is frightening for me; the web is like an extension of my brain and how I keep in touch with all my friends. However, I’ll be with my wonderful friend Eliot and his sister Alysoun all week, hopefully having a blast in the wilderness of western Montana. The town of Heron, where she lives, is right next to the Idaho border, smack-dab in the middle of Kaniksu National Forest. Alysoun apparently enjoys whitewater rafting, and I can only imagine the powerful, roaring opportunities there will be for us to join her in that endeavor. I’m slightly quaking in my shoes. But it’ll be fine, and I will have experiences worth recounting for decades.

But anyways, no internet for me! But lucky for you, I’ve prepared enough blog posts that you won’t have to go a day without perhaps-insightful dispatches from this adventure. Enjoy, and I’ll return to you in a more present fashion in a week!

I have spent so much time here in Chicago at the clean and modern tea shop, Argo Tea. It’s a small corporate chain, with about 10 locations in New York and Chicago, slightly more here than New York. I’m not a huge fan of the foodstuffs they sell, but the tea and the atmosphere are very nice. You can get two hours of internet free with any purchase, and for-here mugs get cheap refills. I went twice my first day in Chicago, and Eliot & I came downtown on rainy yesterday with the express purpose of hanging out on our laptops in Argo Tea all day. I must’ve had five cups of green tea, which may have helped my awfully sore throat a little, but certainly made me pleasantly caffeinated.

I’ve recently switched over from being a coffee (mocha) aficionado to a green (especially jasmine) tea drinker. Aside from murmurs that green tea is good for your health, I think the lower caffeine level in it is much better for my digestion than coffee, which had been making me feel icky. Thus, I now get even more excited by tea houses than I do by coffeeshops, which is really saying something. Really, they’re both good, and I’ve decided that aside from some minor sightseeing, I want to spend a lot of my time on this trip sitting in these caffeine dispensaries, either on the internet or buried in a book, people-watching and generally relaxing. That is what I like to do. #79: You’re only missing out if you believe you’re missing out. I don’t believe I am. Come join me in a tea shop sometime. Maybe you’ll agree. Life is an adventure, and happiness is what happens when we embark on it together.

Yesterday I arrived in Chicago. I didn’t get a lot of sleep on the train. Sleeping in coach isn’t horrible if you have nobody next to you and if your leg-rest isn’t broken; both situations were resolved for me sometime in the middle of the night. As in most legs of this trip, I saw multiple coal trains pass by at regular intervals throughout the night. If I hadn’t read King Coal by Jeff Goodell I would be shocked to see this glaring hint of the consequences of our electricity use.

Speaking of billowing smokestacks, my stomach was turned yesterday morning while passing through northwest Indiana by the BP and US Steel facilities just lake-ward of Gary, Indiana. Talk about an industrial Mordor. Coal trains parked everywhere, smokestacks everywhere you looked, piles of rusting waste, container vehicles emptied and thrown aside all along one side of the tracks, minutes and minutes of this. Huge spewing factory buildings. This is a peephole into the externalized costs of steel and oil.

But on to cheerier things! Upon exiting the train station, I was struck by the block and blocks of corporate skyscrapers in the Loop in downtown Chicago. I was arriving just during the morning rush hour, so their were suit-clad businesspeople hustling down the sidewalks all over the place. It was quite a spectacle. I later discussed with my friends the relative skyscraper content of various cities, with me asserting that Chicago has a relatively and impressively jagged skyline.

My childhood friend Eliot is with me here in Chicago and will travel with me to Heron, Montana, where his sister Alysoun lives. We will stay there for the rest of the week, at which point I will continue on to Vancouver and Eliot will fly home, returning to his exciting (no sarcasm) job doing front-end development at a fast-growing web design company in southern New Hampshire. Eliot and I were close friends for the five or so years he lived next door to me in elementary school, but then lost touch for a number of years. We got back in communication while I was in college, and have since renewed our bond and are joyously on the same wavelength about most things. It is a complete thrill to be spending time with him. Who are you completely on the same wavelength with? Why don’t you spend more time with them?

Eliot arrived shortly after I did in the morning, and we went up to Evanston, where we are staying with my friend’s mother. She is fantastic, and reminds me of my own mother in many ways: gardening all over the place, keeping a slightly messy but very welcoming house, an authentic and warm personality which hides little and is instantly likable. After depositing our stuff and escaping some wonderful hospitality, Eliot and I headed back downtown, where we met up with Ellie, the sister of one of my best high school friends. Ellie walked around town with us all afternoon, which was a lot of fun, just meandering and chatting, laughing at the things around us. You don’t even have to go inside anywhere or pay for anything beyond the basics to have a good time in a new city, as long as you have fun company.

We hopped on a bus and headed back with Ellie to her place in Hyde Park (Obama’s neighborhood), where she and her friends were having a cocktail party as part of senior week at UChicago. Eliot and I ate some baguette with palak paneer and triple-cream brie for dinner, played Blokus with some of the initial guests, sat around sipping cocktails, and generally felt very out of place at a party where we were some of the only male attendees, the only non-UChicago-student attendees, and where all the female attendees were dressed up. We had a good time, but left early.

As neither of us had gotten much sleep the previous night on our respective trains, we were practically comatose for the hour-long bus-and-train commute back up to where we were staying. We quickly fell asleep upon returning there.

Even when you’re not feeling well, travel can be great fun as long as you meet your basic needs of food, water, and a place to stay, and as long as you have good friends to spend your time with. Know how much touristy activity you need to feel satisfied, and just hang out for the rest of your time.

In early April of 2007, I arrived in Dublin, Ireland. It was one of the last and longest stops on my three-week solo train trip (notice a trend?) around Europe. The reason I spent four days in Dublin is similar to the reason I spent the whole semester in Edinburgh: these were mythical lands, immortalized in the traditional songs I had listened to for years. While I have minimal Irish or Scottish ancestry, I felt a connection to the land I still can’t quite explain. On my third day in Dublin, I took a bus tour out of the city and north to the Hill of Tara and Newgrange, two of the most famous ancient historical sites in Ireland. I felt something when I was there, as if the ancient kings and druids were walking there amongst the tour, separated from our senses only by this trifling fourth dimension called time. I felt something similar several months earlier, visiting Stirling in Scotland and the site of the Battle of Bannockburn. This was holy ground for celtophiles.

In the past few days, I have visited the childhood homes of both of my parents, expecting, perhaps, a similar feeling. And to an extent the feeling was there. I imagined them running around the yards with their siblings and parents, as they surely did, and was somewhat in awe. But no one was home at either place, nor did I have a camera, so I left both visits feeling a lack of validation. And while these were the formative abodes of the most significant influencers in my life, the echoes of reality I felt in them were quieter and less vibrant than what I felt in the holy Celtic places.

I think the cause of this dullness is from nothing inherent in my relationships to the places, but rather in the experiences I had visiting the places. My mom’s old house outside Pittsburgh is in a neighborhood devoid of any sidewalks, with winding, hilly suburban roads and country clubs and retirement homes, all smelling faintly of chemical fabric softener, with grass too-saturated by chemical fertilizer. My dad’s childhood home sits, imposing, behind a hedge in a neighborhood which is now quite posh, and I felt some amount of the same exclusion I felt in the gated community of Stamford, CT. I walked for dozens of minutes to reach both, alone, heavy pack on my back, with no resolution upon arrival. I returned to the city centers, from which I was scheduled to depart shortly in each instance, with a feeling of empty accomplishment.

When I visited the locations in the British Isles, I was on tours specifically designed to showcase these relics of history. The people around me also possessed varying degrees of excitement; I was not alone in my enthusiasm, buffeted by the forces of mundane suburbia, as I was last week. The social situation reaffirmed for me that these were important places, worth visiting.

So, while I’m very glad I made both pilgrimages last week, they were the casualties of loneliness and inadequate planning. If I had but corresponded with the houses’ current residences earlier. If only I had a traveling companion who could join me in my appreciation and awe. If only I had the opportunity to make the trips on bike or at least without my heavy backpack on my back. Coulda. Shoulda. Woulda.

Whew! Enough whining rumination from me! If you ever have an opportunity to visit a place you feel the need to visit at some point in your life, here is my advice. Make your trip as comfortable as possible. Travel with a like-minded companion. Make a big thing of it, take pictures, do what you can to affirm your feeling. Sometimes it takes a little planning.

So now I’m off on the furthest-afield portions of my trip, to places far from anywhere I’ve ever been before. Exciting, you say? Yes. Exciting for the opportunities to see friends, spend longer than two days in each place, and experience the progressive cultures I have heard so much about in the Pacific Northwest. Glad you’re along for the ride! It would be less fun without you.

We all have different areas of (and levels of) productivity throughout the day. Some times of day are more creative, some times are more suited to taking in information, and some times of day aren’t good for much of anything. And I know my days undulate in this regard. But generally speaking, the morning and afternoon are times when I am more suited to being productive reading things in front of a computer, and the afternoon and evening are times when I’m better at social things or going out. I imagine going to classes will fit pretty well into my morning routine when those start up for me in the fall, because during class in college, my energy was in the right place most of the time. And I imagine because so much reading will be necessary, that will take on the characteristics of the reading I did in high school for pleasure: it will happen thoroughly at all times of day and night, sometimes in short segments and sometimes in long segments.

This is just a realization that I had about myself. What are your comfortable work timezones? Do you perceive a similar molding of your energy levels to necessity?

I suppose the difficulty of behavior change has become something of a frequent theme here, but the two serendipitously concordant blog posts here incite me to bring you new insight on the topic.

Hugh DeBurgh has a guest post on Zen Family Habits which sounds like just another tip-list post, “7 Surprising Keys to Family Happiness“. And it is that, but it’s the creme of the category: great original tips and succinct explanations of each. The primary message of the first few tips in the list is to talk less, do more. “Stop trying to live and start living.” “Make family happiness a real priority, not just words.” “Stop thinking about what you want and live in the moment.” These ring resonantly for someone who writes a lot about behavior change, but is not really much further down the road of action than you are. Talk less, do more. I feel there’s not much more I can say about that without getting ironic. Better go do something.

But first, the second of the two posts: “Enjoy the Fun of Failure” from Happiness Project. It seems crazy; failure is not fun. But her point is that failure is a necessary step toward improvement, and we should try to get better at seeing instances of our failure as steps in our growth toward who we want to be. This is a damn hard one, and something I struggle with most profoundly in the realm of learning new instruments. That’s an in-depth discussion for some other time, but generally speaking, dealing with failure is something that all of our paradigms probably need some nudging on. Each failure is one step on the road to becoming greater. Think of it that way.

So. Let’s stop talking. Let’s sit down and do something we’ve been fearing, something that we will fail at, something that will make us closer to the people we want to be. Go.

One of the central principles of minimalism and simplicity is sculpting your life to avoid the stress of time-consuming busyness. The ultimate goal is to spend your time calmly doing things which you care about, but to do that it’s usually necessary to pare down your commitments. In an article today on Zen Habits, Leo Babauta implies that you just need to decide to “put an End to Busy”. Unfortunately, he articulates the cause of most people’s busyness quite poorly in the article. People are busy because they’re passionate about many different things; it’s not a form of “bragging” or a need to feel “important”, as Babauta implies.

The actual solution to the problem of busyness is complicated. First, it’s important to sit down and figure out what the most important things for you are. It can be as few as one, or as my mom (the perennial busybody) decided, as many as five areas of your life. Then you need to consciously realign your priorities, in action as well as intention. De-emphasize activities that don’t fit into one of your main areas of focus. It’s not easy; as I’ve asserted before, changing your habitual behavior is one of the hardest things there is. It’s tough removing things from your life, because doing those things must have seemed important at one point. But you don’t have to do everything, and you will probably be happier if you focus in on just a few things.

Society is telling us otherwise; we’re told that yes, we should be doing more things, we should be doing as much as we possibly can! Productivity! Industriousness! But while these qualities in our behavior are beneficial to a certain extent (you’re not going to be happy if you just sit around on the couch all the time), they’re not directly correlated with happiness. Be productive and industrious, in moderation, on a few things that are centrally important to you. That’s the way.