Pride in a friend’s spontaneity

I just have to relate to you this story that my friend just told me about what she did yesterday afternoon. She went to Harvard Square to buy something, but couldn’t for whatever reason. Instead, she decided to sit on Cambridge Common and read for a bit. But after a little while, people started to gather and play games near her, and they invited her to participate. So she played games (all sorts of games, from tag to bananagrams to improv games) with them for several hours! And then to cap it all off, she then saw her cousins morris dancing close enough by for her to watch while she played games! How serendipitous.

Put it on your agenda: reading in public spaces and being open to joining other people’s fun is a great way to enjoy fabulous weather. Or you could organize such games yourself, and invite folks who you see reading nearby!

Reminder: planning is a big deal

Yesterday I had a personal reminder of why planning is important. I drove with a friend from Philadelphia to Stamford, CT. On the way, we were stuck in horrendous traffic all around New York. Being stuck in traffic is absolutely no fun, even with the best of company. You can’t refill your water bottle, there’s no bathroom to use, and you can’t get up to stretch sore muscles. Cars isolate their drivers and passengers from the potential community around them. They pump disastrous carbon into the atmosphere, and particulate toxins into our lungs. Bad news all around. Time for some transportation policy progress.

Then, when we arrived in Stamford, I was reminded how quintessentially suburban that place is. I believe yesterday was the first time I ever set foot in a true mcmansion. It was big enough to get lost in, cloistered at the end of a manicured winding road around a lake, guarded at its entrance by a gatekeeper in a little house. Such land use waste is nauseatingly opulent. How do you broach the subject with people who are friendly, welcoming, and hospitable to you? It’s very delicate, yet it’s such an egregious breach of environmental and social justice that it must be addressed. I would be interested to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Environmental Policy and Environmental Fail

The Gulf oil disaster is the most horrendous disaster to strike the US in living memory. While it may not yet have killed as many as Katrina or 9/11, its consequences have the potential to be more akin to Chernobyl: profoundly affecting people and animals over a wide geographical area. The current question, though, is who should pay the monumental costs of clean-up. BP certainly had the poor safety record that allowed the equipment failure to happen, but it was the oil habit and policies of the American people which created the situation. The first thing to know about raising oil companies’ liability for off-shore drilling is that the proposal in the Senate is to raise it from $75 million to $10 billion. The Gulf oil disaster will cost much more than $10 billion to clean up. So the effort is to make oil companies shoulder a fair portion of the cleanup cost, not to specify the exact ratio. Raising the liability limit seemingly would make it financially inviable for oil companies to drill in the ocean anymore, due to the insurance they would have to buy. David Roberts has a great article on Grist outlining the realities of the debate.

Roberts has also recently taken up the flag of the American Power Act, otherwise known as the Kerry-Lieberman climate bill. The bill gets us started on ending our oil addiction, and due to political prospects for the next few elections, it is the last chance we have to do so in a reasonably comfortable fashion. Roberts’ argument to this effect is here. There has been a thorough analysis of the bill’s merits by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, which Roberts summarizes here. But it’s not going so well. Conventional wisdom is that it’s doomed. Roberts asserts that only a strong push from Obama and all Democratic leadership, combined with organizing in key legislators’ constituencies, will give the bill a chance. It needs an effort as big as the health care bill. It’s hard to see that happening, though. But since it’s the last boat off Oil Island, we’d better try to take it.

Persevere through tiredness

I’m tired or exhausted a lot. I think it’s because my sleep schedule is irregular due to the attitude of spontaneity under which I travel. Also, I don’t get enough exercise and my diet is occasionally off-kilter. Regardless, I frequently don’t feel like doing something adventurous.

Today I did anyway. I went with a good friend of mine to meet another friend in Center City. She helped us practice slacklining a little, then we played some music. I picked up tunes pretty well, though I haven’t picked up my pennywhistle in years. Then we got lunch and walked over to City Hall, where we played more music and made a total of twenty-five dollars! It was well worth it.

So I am reminded that one of the best ways to get energy is to do things, and when I don’t have energy, I shouldn’t let that keep me from having adventures. As long as I can keep my eyes open, they’re probably going to be worth the effort.

Primary Elections

Last night there were a number of primary and special elections around the country, and the results were a resounding victory for progressive Democrats. Joe Sestak defeated Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania in the Senate primary. Bill Halter kept Blanche Lincoln under 50% in the Arkansas Senate primary, forcing a run-off that he has a good chance of winning. Jack Conway won the Kentucky Democratic Senate primary, putting Democrats in the best position in that state. And finally, Mark Critz won the Pennsylvania 12th District Special Election, by a margin substantial enough that Republicans are running scared. There is hope for this country yet, but not if you’re rooting for an ineffectual, obstructionist incumbent. So, while there does still need to be more enthusiasm among progressive laypeople, I feel pretty good about the way things are going after last night.

Meditation

I really want to start practicing meditation. Not for any religious reason, but instead because there is extensive research showing that meditation is excellent for your mental and physical health. Also, I have observed that friends of mine who meditate are generally calmer than those who don’t, and calmness is something I greatly value.

Gil Fronsdal offers six hour-long classes in introductory meditation on audiodharma.org, and while I haven’t listened to them yet, they’re free, so I recommend you check them out if you’re interested.

Sweeping

Today I swept and mopped a floor. It was very enjoyable. It was an easy, repetitive task, with a distinct completion. When I was done, the space I was working on was much cleaner. I highly recommend taking your next opportunity to do the same.

Home

I looked up “home” in Merriam-Webster. Here is what I found:

  1. one’s place of residence, domicile
  2. the social unit formed by a family living together
  3. a familiar or usual setting, congenial environment; also, the focus of one’s domestic attention
  4. a place of origin

This came to mind because on the bus earlier today I was watching Garden State with my girlfriend Nicole, and Zach Braff’s character says:

You know that point in your life when you realize the house you grew up in isn’t really your home anymore? All of a sudden, even though you have some place where you put your shit, that idea of home is gone. One day it just sort of happens and it’s gone. You feel like you can never get it back. It’s like you feel homesick for a place that doesn’t even exist. Maybe it’s like this rite of passage, you know? You won’t ever have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it’s like a cycle or something. I don’t know, but I miss the idea of it, you know. Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people that miss the same imaginary place.

That struck a chord with both Nicole and I. She is about to graduate college and go to work all summer on a boat (which is in some ways a home and in some ways not), after which she plans to move to Boston with me. Also, just after we watched this segment of the movie, she got a call from her parents who were packing up her room at her dad’s house, because he’s moving. It was moving for me because I am traveling for most of 2010, without a regular home to go back to. Until recently, the house in Amherst that I grew up in was my home, and Connecticut College was home for a short time too. But I graduated college, so that stopped being home. And when I’m done with my big cross-country trip, I will abruptly move to Boston, and that will be my home.  It’s very turbulent when you feel like you don’t have a home.

But the dictionary definition provides some solace, echoed by some cheesy and some not-so-cheesy thoughts I’ve had. Definitions 2 and 3 reflect one feeling I’ve had about home recently: that home for me is wherever Nicole is. But that doesn’t capture the full meaning of “home”. That meaning is fleshed out in definition 4, which assures me that Amherst is still my home (and 2 and 3 say that as well). Definition 3, further, imparts a label of “home” upon any familiar place. So Amherst is still my home, as is Connecticut College, as is Camberville, as are all the places I’ve been enough to breed familiarity.

So, while it can indeed be sad realizing that the place that was once undeniably your home is now not as fully your home, this plurality is comforting in a way. It’s comforting because the more places you can call home, the more places you are excited about arriving at. And that’s a good thing. What are your thoughts about the concept of “home”?

Let go of your rut

We attach to feelings as if they define us, and ironically, not just positive ones. If you’ve wallowed in regret or disappointment for years, it can seem safe and even comforting to suffer.

Lori Deschene writes a wonderful (if long) guest post on Zen Habits about finding a Zen contentment by disconnecting our emotions from attachment to the fickle circumstances of the world around us.

The idea articulated in the above quote is related to the difficulty I blogged about of doing hard things which are necessary for your goals. But also, I think it’s a big reason for the persistence of unfortunate life circumstances. When a certain paradigm or rut is established, it’s hard to break out of for this very reason. The little exercises suggested by Deschene provide a good path to letting go of your ruts, and I hope they help you focus on what’s most important: this moment.

Washing Machines

If I as an individual buy a super-green washing machine, it may take years to “earn out” (to have saved me more in water and energy costs than the difference in price between the green machine and cheaper, more wasteful alternatives). Ten people using that same machine, however, would earn out much more quickly (as well as reducing their individual backstory footprints), meaning they could live more sustainably, more cheaply.

This quote from a Feb 2007 article by Alex Steffen of Worldchanging made me think. It’s so much more convenient to have a washer & dryer in your building than to go to a laundromat. It’s also probably more energy- and water-efficient to use an individual “super-green washing machine” than it is to use the machines in a laundromat. What if the tenants of a building without such a machine got together at the beginning of the lease term and approached the landlord with a proposal: we band together and purchase a good washer & dryer for you to keep in the building after we leave. It would be in the tenants’ interest, because their individual shares of the cost would likely be less than their annual laundromat bills. It would be in the landlord’s interest, because having an in-building washer & dryer makes an apartment more desirable, and she doesn’t have to pay for the added value. Is there something flawed in my assumptions? Why don’t more tenants do this?