between my runs and wednesday and friday of last week, the park completely transformed, as the trees leafed out and shed their petals. that one day of awkward in-between growth, when they're covered in splotches of wilted flowers and looking shaggy under an uneven coif of floppy new leaves, is such a tidy little adolescence, and it reminds me of what I love about teaching high school students: they're like trees at the end of april, working hard to replace their frenzied and florid blooms with green baby leaves that will unfurl to let them drink in the sunlight. after two years working only in other people's classrooms, the last of my kids are about to graduate from high school. some of my first are about to graduate from college. I can't believe we're all so old, so grown, even in this springtime stage of life.
while I'm here, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who's been responding and making me think (and talk) more completely about my environmentalist outrage. it's good, and you're all great. want to come sit in on my dissertation committee meetings?
[ 29.4.08] · [ ]
I've been thinking a lot about why I try so hard with all this small-footprint stuff. not why I do the things that are easy and habitual and fun, like eating the greenmarket vegetables that I carry home in a string bag, or taking the stairs instead of the elevators. those kinds of things are their own reward. but why the things that make my life more difficult without giving me any apparent benefits in return? like paying extra on my energy bill so that con ed will pass my money along to some wind farm in the mountains, or keeping buckets of compost on our kitchen shelves instead of throwing potato peelings and kale stalks into the garbage. or hunting through musty and usually overpriced thrift stores for a pair of pants to replace the ones that will soon be too tattered to wear to work, when I could just go spend thirty dollars at old navy and be done with it.
it's honestly not because I think personal action makes a difference on any meaningful level. yeah the ocean is a multitude of drops, but how much does that matter if the government has a wave machine? I want to be optimistic, but I don't believe we are getting out of this one. I do believe that no matter what we do at this point, the average global temperature will keep going up and the ice will keep melting. it's just a question of how much, how fast, how hard it will be for us to adapt, and whether we adapt in a way that works for the long term. and I think that at this point, whatever is going to happen will happen regardless of whether I eat drive-through mcnuggets or container garden tomatoes, and whether I ride on a bicycle or in a hummer.
but it's precisely because the problem is so much bigger than me, than my life, that it feels so wrong to contribute to it. the carbon dioxide molecules for which I am responsible, like all anthropogenic co2, could easily stay in the atmosphere for thirty thousand years after I'm dead. long enough for 900 generations of my descendants to be affected by it. and while I don't think my efforts to curtail the impact of my lifestyle on the global environment is going to mean much during my lifetime, the cumulative effect over thirty thousand years just might be worthwhile. in the meantime, hopefully the local environment will be a little better for it, and I'm in rehearsal for the day when maybe all the doomsday predictions come true, and we have to cook our homegrown food in solar ovens.
the urge to just reject it all, to completely disengage from our broken materialistic society that won't let me wear my patched jeans and recycled-tire shoes to work, can be pretty overwhelming. I don't actually buy into that as a solution, though. if I've learned anything from stories like into the wild, it's that going off on your own is the one way to guarantee that no matter how little you take, you give absolutely nothing back.
so instead I'm working on a selective rejection policy. for example, what I really want to do with my forthcoming economic stimulus payment is refuse it on general principle. the economy is in bad shape because oil is getting more expensive, and food is getting more expensive, and we're just beginning to see -- not even to pay, but to see -- the true price of cultivating a consumption-based culture in which disposability is an added value. it seems to me that the solution to this is anything but buying more stuff, and that the economic stimulus plan is almost guaranteed to make things worse in the long run. so I absolutely refuse to stimulate the economy. (this morning tom and I went trash-hunting to find extra containers for our little vegetable garden. do you think eggplants can grow in an old construction boot? maybe that's kind of gross.)
originally I was just going to stick that $300 in my savings account, but I started to feel like that was somehow disingenuous. it's not really my money, you know? I didn't earn it. I didn't ask for it. I think it's a bad idea for the government to give it to me. it's not like I can't use it; my yearly salary is small enough that I qualify for the earned income tax credit. but at the same time, it's not like I'm going to starve or go homeless without it.
I think, in lieu of keeping my 300 dollars, I'm going to plant 300 trees. reforestation of a tropical landscape seems like an all-around good thing for the planet, the atmosphere, the climate, and hopefully even some human beings. what do you think? I'm open to suggestions. (and by the way: happy earth day.)
[ 20.4.08] · [ ]
check out this set of clear, succinct graphs that outlines how food prices have changed over the last three years, and how that just might be related to ethanol production here in the united states. (it might also be related to my urge to kick politicians in the shins when they act like "energy independence and the environment" are the same thing, or like "homegrown biofuels" are something to be proud of.)
be sure to scroll down to the last one to see how, as usual, the world's poorest people stand to get the most thoroughly screwed as we americans cling desperately to the belief that driving an suv to the mcdonald's pick-up window is some kind of god-given right. ugh.
[ 14.4.08] · [ ]
self-defenestration
last thursday, tom and I both left for work via fire escape.
the front door wouldn't open because the bolt, which had been acting finicky for a while, got stuck. tom rattled it and poked at it with screwdrivers and knives, but it wouldn't budge. we called the superintendent and woke him up -- we could hear him rustling about overhead, presumably getting out of bed and finding some clothes to put on -- but even with people attacking the bolt from both sides of the door, it stayed resolutely locked. it was sort of creepy being trapped inside our own home, even if our captor was nothing more than a bit of stubborn, malfunctioning metal. the space between our walls seemed to be narrowing. then tom called through the door to tell the super that he was going to climb out the window, or else he would be late for teaching his first class of the day.
I was relieved to see that the fire escape ladder was functional, although so heavy that it nearly tore tom's arm out of his socket as he tried to lower it to the ground. since I was little I've had a weird, terrified fascination with fire, and I've often pictured myself trying to flee a burning building only to encounter a broken fire escape. usually the ladder is rusted or otherwise broken and won't slide down. sometimes the entire metal assembly comes tearing off the wall, crumpling and melting into a mangled cage for the people trying to escape. so our successful egress was reassuring.
my family used to conduct fire drills -- now that I think about it, I'm not sure what the relationship was between them and my pyro-fixation -- and I still remember the plans for escaping from each of our homes. in the farmhouse, my second-floor bedroom window looked out over the roof of the porch, and I was supposed to climb out and slide down until I could drop off the edge to the ground. in the next house, my bedroom window was positioned directly over the spigot for the garden hose. I still remember what it felt like to climb backwards out the window, scraping my flat eight-year-old chest across the lip of the casing, stretching my left toe as far as I could until it hit that tiny bit of metal sticking out of the wall. then I could turn around and jump.
when tom was on his way down the ladder, we were still in the seven o'clock hour, and the sidewalks were deserted. I left forty-five minutes later, in front of a curious audience of commuters en route to the subway. "just practicing," I said, before waving to the super to let him know that he could pull the ladder back up. (when I got home that evening, though, I was glad to go in through the front door.)
[ 7.4.08] · [ ]
on my last day in baltimore, which was luckily also the day it wasn't cold and rainy, I left the inner harbor and walked past camden yards before turning northward into a meandering loop that took me well outside of tourist-land. I was quite conspicuously out of place in my conference clothes, and honestly in my complexion as well, and I got several not-so-innocent offers from would-be tourguides. (one guy asked if I wanted to get a cup of coffee with him, and when I said, truthfully, that I don't drink coffee, he seemed so delighted by this little quirk that he walked with me for three blocks so he could hear the whole story of how caffeine makes me a crazy person.) I had already committed the downtown area map to memory, at least enough that I would know where going in any particular direction would eventually take me, so I declined the company and wandered alone, with my narst nametag hidden in the pocket of my pea coat.
I can see why baltimore isn't on a lot of my-favorite-cities lists, but I just like being in a place, existing somewhere on a normal human scale, moving through a city in an ordinary way. I sat on the floor of the library for a while, walked through quiet neighborhoods where cats watched me through their rowhouse windows, navigated through the crowds of people outside a cluster of ninety-nine cent stores, and felt well situated. housing projects and public schools look pretty much the same no matter where you go, right? baltimore is tangibly hardscrabble, but not unhappy, and its nickname doesn't seem as ironic as I had been led to expect. it helped that there were magnolias and apple blossoms and freshly bloomed tulips everywhere, like brilliant little gifts from the unfamiliar latitude.
not too long after I returned to the hotel, we piled into the car and headed home to new york city. we were chasing behind a rainstorm, so that for most of the drive, the road was wet even though the sun was beaming golden late afternoon light through the car windows. the spray kicked up by passing trucks sent the constituent wavelengths of that light splaying out in concentric arcs, and for several dozen miles we were driving through clouds of rainbows.
at a rest stop alongside the new jersey turnpike, while my carpooling companions went to buy soft serve and sprinkles, I inspected my stockings in the bathroom and discovered a run stretching up from under my right heel to the back of my knee. I'd already patched up another hole with nail polish, figuring that it didn't matter as long as it could hide under my skirt, but even I can't justify walking around with my stockings visibly unraveling. so I took them off, left them in the trashcan on top of a pile of damp paper towels, and traveled the rest of the way to brooklyn with my feet bare inside my mary janes.
[ 3.4.08] · [ ]
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