Shake up the world

Imagine if, like a Boggle game, someone picked up the Earth and shook it up, and let all the countries fall into new slots, wherever chance happens to land them. Imagine if, suddenly, our neighbor wasn't Connecticut, but Afghanistan. Wow, what would the world be like? You know, if we had to expect crazy worldwide Boggle-storms every few years that always had us wondering where we'd end up next. Well, I'm really only pondering this because I saw an image of the artist Martin Wilner's piece Making History on an art blog called Moon River. I love how much this piece got me thinking. I also love Moon River. You're always met with something beautiful there.

End of summer, thanks to offshore drilling

GOOD's blog has been awesome lately, their new blogger Alexandra is funny and fun. I had to repost this image somewhere, it's a great t-shirt design on Threadless.

While on the subject, Grist made a good point on how best to drive home to people how bad an idea this is: Oil drilling = Oil spilling. This concept is even most applicable in lots of red southern states that have big support for keeping coastlines clean. I hope the Republicans and McCain will continue to shoot themselves in the foot!

Oh and also on the shooting themselves in the foot topic, The Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby pointed out that though overturning the DC gun ban is another horrible idea, it could actually free up gun owners to vote for Obama, since the Supreme Court ruling means McCain's influence isn't needed to keep guns legal. At least there's a silver lining!

Giraffes, a moose, and dream significance

Just needed to share with you the proliferation of large, hoofed mammals that have been coinciding in my life lately. This is the lovely photo of the lovely moose that Erin and I found galloping down the dirt road from the AMC camp we stayed at in 100-Mile Wilderness Maine this weekend. We named her Sadie (or Erin did, but I couldn't help but have reservations since this is one name I had secretly picked out as a good baby daughter name someday, and now I have this odd story to tell her about where I got the name--"from a moose honey! and not just any moose, the first one I ever saw."). And in addition to this, I had a dream last night about giraffes. I vaguely remembered this when a 9th grader named Danielle at the Green Teens Day event I participated in today was discussing what she does as a volunteer at the Franklin Park Zoo. "We got to go behind the cages and see the baby giraffe," she told me. "He was six feet tall!" Now I am wondering, was it a coincidence that I dreamt about a giraffe last night, or is that we dream about all kinds of crazy stuff like that but never find out unless someone or something happens to remind you of it the next day? Sigh...I shall never know. Well have a lovely animal kingdomabulous weekend, lovelies.

You can't Google an experience

An obvious fact, but one that I noticed today and appreciated: No matter how much I Google-Map my trip to Greenville, Maine, it can never tell me just what's in store. This place I'm going to, Erin and I, is up in the heart of Maine's "100-Mile Wilderness," and once the pink highlighter line zags off I-95, it seems to be nothing more than a squiggle on the screen, and no computer, no Web site, no "Widget" can make it more. I'm going to hold on to this thought with admiration and relief. Google can't steal the road trip from us, no matter how many different angle and zoom features its Earth application achieves. The road is there, always a mystery, until we roll down it. Yeah sure, people can videotape and take pictures and journal things like that, but those media don't worry me. They are pigeonholed views, personalized and colored by the individual's experience. (Which usually makes me even more curious about what my own experience could be, such as my reading of Paul Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar--if I did that trip today, 30 years after he did it, from my own point of view, the trip would be entirely different. So, I think, of course, that the world does in fact need one more experience, one more travelogue, because mine would be just as unique and powerful as anyone's!). No, I am just glad that Google can't take that away from us: our perspective. If such a tool were available--one that would only require you to type a Start location and a Destination into two little boxes, hit Enter, and Voila! suddenly whisk you down all the country roads, from a car-window view, wind blowing in your hair, the faint scent of cow manure tickling your nose--I'll admit, I would lose no time in giving into the temptation to sit at my computer and type and click my way around the world all day. I've even felt that urge now, the urge to complain and to call for further advancements in Google technology, that why isn't this possible yet? We are in the digital age or the information age or whatever you call it, and we still have so far to go! And then I caught myself; I laughed. I told myself, this is exactly why you need to go hang out in the woods this weekend, because you are forgetting things. You're getting distracted, carried away, oversaturated with blogdom and Flickr accounts. There can be too much of these things, and I've started to cross that threshold. So today, in just a few hours, I will soon be rolling down that window, and letting all those cyber strangleholds on my brain fly off in the breeze. The woods, my dear. I can't wait to see you again.

Monstrous mountains of ice

The below account really startled me. It's from Arctic explorer Ben Saunders' online journal. He was on a mission to, solo, unsupported, and on foot, set a new world speed record from Ward Hunt Island to the Geographic North Pole. His journey was brought to an abrupt end when he came upon a landscape of monstrous mounds of crushed up ice, called pressure ridges. When he finally made the climb up the first ridge, he was met with "an endless view of rubble ice so smashed up that it made anything I saw at the start of this expedition seem like child's play." He goes on:

"An interesting thought occurred as I scrambled on. It's quite possible that no one else has seen multi-year sea ice (ice that's thick enough to survive the summer) in this state before. The summer of 2007 saw the biggest Arctic melt ever recorded - more than half the pack ice disappeared completely, and if things continue at this rate, there won't be any multi-year ice left in a few years' time. There will come a point, equally, when it's impossible to reach the North Pole on foot. The consensus among the experts at Eureka was that the ice on the Canadian side this year was more fractured than they'd ever seen before. Right now, camped on a modestly-sized flat bit of ice, surrounded by towering ridges, that's not a very comforting thought. I feel a bit like a mouse curled up in a rusty car-crusher, hoping it won't creak and rumble into action tonight. Hopefully things will improve tomorrow, as I can't take many more days this tough."

It seems so undescribable for an individual to experience the effects of global warming and a melting ice cap so completely first hand. I can't imagine how piercing the impact had to have been on Ben, seeing as it has affected all his readers so startlingly. One of the comments included this link to a NASA report on last summer's unprecedented ice melting, a "23-percent loss in the extent of the Arctic's thick, year-round sea ice cover." Even though it was cut short, his mission does great things for spreading awareness about the seriousness of this issue. The fact that he and all the many people involved with his expedition were so taken by surprise by the ice's state just goes to show how we are still so far from comprehending the damage that we are capable of wreaking on our planet.

Two weeks in the Pac Northwest

So I'll be floating around the Pacific Northwest for the next two weeks. No plans, except to see good friends, explore, and relax. This is going to be a beautiful thing. Here's a little about Day One.
I'm sitting at an ancient iMac, using my free internet privilege in the Green Tortoise hostel on First and Pike in downtown Seattle, hearing at least three different types of music at once. There's a capella gospel, traditional Irish/rock meld, and some (I'm guessing) local rap. I think I hear some NPR too. This morning I went for a 2ish-mile run around downtown, down Western & First along the waterfront, right on Broad past a science museum, the Space Needle, scattered sculptures, and a huge, gold, blue, and red metal building with bulbous curves and domes that has to have been designed by Frank Gehry. I don't know what it houses, I couldn't make it out from the signs, but my guess is some kind of art museum. I took my time this morning, because I'm still on Eastern time, and what was 8 a.m. for Seattlites was 11 a.m. for me. I felt strangely like an early riser putting on my running shoes at 8:30, it was pretty fun. I could get used to this using the time-change to my advantage thing. As soon as I got back from my run (which was nice, but the city was still pretty deserted--at first I thought, Boston isn't this dead on Sunday morning! But really I'm kidding myself, there's no way I'd know that...), complimentary breakfast was still in full swing. Actually, now that I think of it, I think it was only so glorious because it's Sunday. Lucky me! During the week I bet it's just toast and cereal. This was a nice surprise, because I swear that last night the check-in girl told me free breakfast from 6-7:45 (to which I promptly thought, right, screw that!). So I jumped in the waffle line and poured out some gooey batter onto a steaming iron. Then I wandered into the adjacent kitchen and found that there was a range full of pans and people cooking eggs! So once I finished my yummy waffle, I fired up some scrambled. Pretty awesome for my first 12 hours in Seattle. Now the plan is to, now that I've dutifully checked out by 10:57 and turned in my bed linens, find some good coffee (still haven't had any, it's about time) before I schlep over to the Greyhound station on 8th and Stewart. Portland here I come!

The windchimes on Cherry Street

People in puffy coats coming up Summer cringed at the wind that blew into their faces, as I crossed their paths and thought about coincidences. The dried out tiny flowers danging from a nearby tree behind a fence reminded me of the loose-leaf, whole-flower chamomile tea that I had found in the kitchen at work earlier today. The sound of a plastic bottle rolling around at the back of the bus mimicked perfectly the one that had bobbled all the way down an Orange line car just a little while before. Earlier in the week, a few days after re-watching I Heart Huckabees for the first time, I realized that I, also, had an African guy coincidence. Two days in a row I had passed him on the first floor hallway at work; one time he had held the door for me, and said hello to someone that was coming in behind me. A thin, young girl that always wears the same black head scarf and waits for the same 5:52 bus as me most days suddenly didn't seem lonely anymore when a smiling, tan-skinned young man came up to her and gave her a hug before getting on a different bus. And then I heard the windchimes on Cherry Street again, after forgetting they were there all winter. The clouds were large and multi-hued--the sun today was only lighting up half the sky--and pin-prick raindrops sprinkled down through the rays. I looked at a little brick path in someone's front yard, remembering the evening when I saw a nonchalant little long-haired cat hop down the porch steps of (what I think must be) his house, prance down the sidewalk a few yards ahead of me, then turn into a gateway a few doors down and follow said narrow, decorative path through the yard and around back. I guessed that he was probably paying a friend a visit.
(Photo from the IslandWood grad program blog: my new favorite dream. They offer a Residency in Environment, Education, and Community, on Bainbridge Island, near Seattle. I plan on visiting in April).

Little ole lonely elevator girl

This photo, "Elevator- Miami Beach", published in Robert Frank's 1959 book The Americans (which I'd love to check out) is introduced by Jack Kerouac, who described this photograph as his favorite in the volume. He says: "And I say: That little ole lonely elevator girl looking up sighing in an elevator full of blurred demons, what's her name & address?"

Michael Bierut of Design Observer uses this example as the best representation of bershon, a word for girl's, predominantly teen-aged, rolled-eyes, hate-the-world facial expressions in photographs like this and those found in any family's photo heap stuffed in the basement. He says, "So keep trying, girls. Right now you're surrounded by jerks. But somewhere there's a Jack Kerouac who's desperately trying to find you."

Sometimes I feel like putting on this face myself. When did I ever grow to discontinue the rolled-eyes look? I think it needs to be brought back. People don't mess with you when you give them this look. It's a perfect manifestation of utter exhaustion with the world combined with sullen hatred for both everyone and no one, while not knowing how to vent this frustration. So you brood. I finally vented to Erin recently in a very long e-mail. I started out saying, yeah, I had fun at the show at the Middle East last night, threw in words like feeling "extra single" and "karma coming back" to "we are told over and over again we should be strong single women, but after awhile that all feels like a ruse..." and escalated to:

is that so wrong? i actually found myself feeling comforted by an article in the boston globe recently about how women should spend their 20s looking for a mate (gah! that just sounds horrible on hearing it!) but when you look at the science of it, it actually makes a lot of sense. biology only lets you have children for a finite time, and you can have a career anytime. (and i also despise the pressure to "establish a career" in your 20s; that's just bullshit. no one establishes a career in their 20s! all you do is entry level gruntwork because frankly, people think you're too young to do important things. i want to wait to be famous (haha) until i'm smarter anyway! i think it's good to know your limits and not freak about them--i think we'll all get there, we should just give it more time and get the chance to live more). three of the top guys in my company's management admitted at a recent meeting that they were all hippies before they got serious about work. one said he didn't get a job till he was 30! so enough of this wasting our youth on career prospects- it's a big conspiracy to turn us into the clueless hamsters that fuel the big corporate machines. and that definitely does not mean i think we should husband-hunt instead, but i'm starting to think that people are so blinded by the pursuit of success that they forget about looking for happiness in friends and relationships first. that must be why i am so fed up with the impersonality of young people where we live, they are too focussed on success to connect and make real friendships and form caring communities, and i think that is a shame! if only there were some way to wake people up to re-evaluate their values and priorities, which seems to be made extra difficult by the fact that no one listens to anyone else since they're too obsessed with vociferating and screeching about their own opinions in their crazed effort to get noticed.

OK-- please refrain from thinking I'm a backwards stay-at-home mom wannabe, because I'm not in any way. I have lots of goals (too many, which may be my problem), and I intend to accomplish most of them, someday. And I don't mean to offend anyone who happens to love their job and wants to dedicate themselves to it; I actually think that's great, as well as lucky. I'm merely disappointed in people my age's ability to form meaningful relationships and communities, and how we just put up with life in a fractured world of sporadic communication with old friends from high school and college instead of looking after your neighbors and feeling looked after yourself. We've been taught to find ourselves. But how do we find our people?

Trying to look good limits my life

I watched the documentary Helvetica today, and it was pretty interesting, even if I got nothing from it but to the chance to pick the brains of some well known contemporary and historic designers. Stefan Saggmeister is just one of a few neat ones (Michael Bierut's spoke with particular vividness about the transformation from 50s goofy script to the eponymous clean, bold typeface of the 60s), and I really like his billboard installation "Trying to look good limits my life." He's totally right. He says: "The title of this work (and its content) is among the few things I have learned in my life so far." Some of the others are "Having guts always works out for me", and "Everything I do always comes back to me." Cool images + food for thought = at least one happy moment in the day.

Fighting doldrums and loving prisons

Yesterday I thought about milkshakes bringin' boys to the yard and other people's milkshakes being drunk "up" through a straw and avalanches falling on Mars and how writers and literary people might be the best judges of character as well as, historically, the best neuroscientists.

Today I thought a lot less. I was too busy festering a hatred for the MBTA for a full freezing 40 minutes, waiting for the Davis-bound 90 that never came. Two Wellington 90s breezed through, and at the second one's driver I demanded in a loud, quivery voice "Where is the Davis bus??" (To which he shrugged, "Iowwknow"). This was anger I couldn't control, I hadn't felt anything like this in any recent memory. I thudded my head against the pane-glass of the bus shelter. I audibly sighed and whined. I kicked the ground, I shuffled around on the sandy pavement. And I stared narrowly at the tiny corner where the buses swing around and got angrier by the second. I started to shake a little, and my eyes were trying to fill up with tears. The harder I stared, the more I wanted to cry. "I'll cry!" I told myself. I'll just let myself cry, and have a mini-tantrum, because this bus is never going to come. Never. I know it. I'm stranded. I don't know what to do. I can't stay here anymore, I will freak out. I cannot handle this one second longer. Every bus that flung around the cement entryway said some other number: 101, 104, 91, 93, finally 89. I got on the 89, sat down, and then let the tears stream down my face.

Dan Grabiewskus and his nice cover-up of the T's random and malicious bus cancellation policy. Even after he admitted to it (which lets him off the hook none at all), they're still blatantly proceeding with its insidiousness.

Anyway. I did think about something else today. I was e-mailing with my friend Maura, who had just told me about her experience leading an improvisational dance class at a prison, and I was trying to remember this statistic I read: it was that 1 in 100 Americans are in prison, the highest rate ever (and, unsurprisingly, the highest in the world). Not only that, but the rate of increase in government prison-spending (now $49 billion) over the last twenty years is SIX times higher than the rate of increase in education spending in the same period. What? Does that make sense? Kentucky had the highest rate of prison population growth: 600% over the last 3o years, even though its crime rate has creeped up just 3% in that time.

That made me appreciate how amazing Maura's service to the community really is. There is clearly something broken in our system when we spend six times more money on punishing people than on educating them to begin with. Maura said that after leaving she kept pondering how much she takes her freedom for granted. This was a good reminder to me too; I've been rejoicing in my ability to finally escape from Boston for a couple weeks in April on a trip around the Pacific Northwest to visit friends and breathe fresh air and be outside with trees and rivers. But I haven't stopped to think how lucky I am to be able to just high-tail it out of here whenever the going gets tough. Some people are pretty much stuck where they are. However, I think the great thing about America is that, it is so big and diverse and relatively cheap to travel around by car or bus, Kerouac style or however you can do it, I think exploration and adventure is essentially within reach of everyone. You just have to step out your front door.

Finally, my ranting is dwindling down. I'll close with this excerpt I found on kottke.org from Kim Chinquee's new book Oh Baby, a compilation of "flash fiction" and prose poetry. During my fighting thoughts today its closing quieted my emotions a bit.

She sent me pictures of the cake. They had a flaming onion, whisky sours, steak and fried potatoes. They gambled at the Soaring Eagle, losing hundreds and then thousands. "You got married to my mom," I said to him on my end. I got married at the Justice of the Peace, picking up two people, offering to pay them. The first said no thanks and the second said he was too injured. We found another couple who seemed angelic, their voices a team, an echo. "She's a catch," he said, kind of laughing. I heard him on the exhale. He smoked on the back porch that faced a lake, where we'd once gone fishing, catching nothing worth keeping.

What could have happened?

"I fought hard. But your guns were well aimed. The bullets flew like birds in the air, and whizzed by our ears like the wind through the trees in the winter. My warriors fell around me…. The sun rose dim on us in the morning, and at night it sunk in a dark cloud, and looked like a ball of fire. That was the last sun that shone on Black Hawk….He is now a prisoner to the white men….He has done nothing for which an Indian ought to be ashamed. He has fought for his countrymen, the squaws and papooses, against white men, who came year after year, to cheat them and take away their lands. You know the cause of our making war. It is known to all white men. They ought to be ashamed of it. Indians are not deceitful. The white men speak bad of the Indian and look at him spitefully. But the Indian does not tell lies. Indians do not steal."

This is the surrender speech made by Chief Black Hawk of the Sac and Fox Indians of Illinois after his defeat in the Black Hawk War and his people's subsequent removal by white troops. per the policy of President Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, 1832.

Why does the emotion in this passage strike such a stark contrast with the greed of white men in rampantly taking land for themselves across the North American continent throughout the early history of America? Why is it so obvious who was right and who was wrong? Why is these injustices never thought of? Why have we not done more to repent and express remorse for these egregious acts? What have we been doing these last one hundred seventy-six years to make up for our mistakes?

This past week the new Prime Minister of Australia, Kevid Rudd, made a public apology to the Aboriginal people of the continent for all the criminal acts and assimilation policies dealt upon them by the government during most of the 20th century (forcibly relocating "Stolen Generation" Aboriginal children to white families up until the 1970s!). Has any U.S. president done anything like this?

Another question: Could we have lived in harmony? If white men had been more respectful and peace-loving and sharing, could there have been enough to go around for everyone, Indian and white and black alike? I’d like to find out. Is such a utopia possible? Logistically, I wonder if whites could have settled next to Indians and worked together to create a new, peaceful society. Would there have been enough land and food to ensure happiness? Let’s try to erase history. Let’s go back and fix it. Let’s look for the perfect world.

Goodbye to a faithful friend...

Here's the lowdown on the threat of cancer-causing toxins leaching into your drinking water from your Nalgene bottle (which has caused major Canadian retailer Mountain Equipment Co-op or MEC to pull them off their shelves in December 2007, according to Yahoo! News on Dec. 23, 2007). A harmful chemical called bisphenol-A (BPA) was found to leach into bottle contents, not just in old, worn bottles or in bottles treated with harsh detergents as initially found in a 1997 Case Western Reserve University study, but also in new bottles at room temperature, according to a 2003 University of Missouri study. BPA is found to an imbalance in cells' genetic material, potentially leading to cancer, miscarriage, and birth defects. A Canadian group called Environment Defence tested a sample of Canadians for toxic chemicals and found that every single person had bisphenol A in his or her blood. (Which means I must be screwed).

So here is what to look out for: plastics marked with recycling symbol #7 (not all #7 plastics are harmful, but there's no way to tell difference so it is suggested to avoid them all). See this paragraph from an article in Non-Toxic Times, a publication of the non-toxic product company Seventh Generation, for specifics on plastic types (which I found pretty interesting, we use so much of this stuff every day, and how often do you pay attention to the little number in the recycling symbol on the bottom?):

Unfortunately, polycarbonate plastic bottles and containers are identified by the plastic recycling symbol #7, which is used for a wide variety of plastics and plastic mixtures that fall into the "Other" category. Unless this #7 symbol is accompanied by the letters "PC", there's no sure way to tell if the container in question is made from polycarbonate or some other kind. To be safe, environmental advocates suggest simply avoiding #7 plastics altogether and opting for safer choices for food and beverage storage. These better options include polypropylene (#5 PP), high density polyethylene (#2 HDPE), and low density polyethylene (#4 LDPE). No evidence has been found to suggest that these plastics leach toxic materials. Scientists advise against the repeated use of plastic water bottles made from plastic type #1 PETE as there is evidence to suggest that such bottles leach a compound known as DEHA, which is classified by the EPA as a possible human carcinogen, as well as acetaldehyde, which has received the same designation from the International Agency for Research on Cancer. (http://leas.ca/On-the-Trail-of-Water-Bottle-Toxins.htm)

Some friends were warning me about this, so I investigated and low and behold, I do believe them. Now I use a sleek-looking stainless steel guy. He's pretty cool. Sorry Nalgene, you have been a loyal, dependable companion to me for a couple years now. I will miss you!

let's.

let's make this a post that doesn't have to matter much. all that matters is the post itself, that it is here, regardless of whether it informs the world or the world informs it or anything along those lines. it's just a post about me sitting on the edge of my green bed with my legs crossed and my white puffy marshmallow-like slippers on my feet. with my dangling foot twitching or wiggling or whatever the most apt verb for that motion is. i am scrolling through the posts of the past week on saidthegramophone.com, my new music ditty-finder, with very cutesie whimsical unself-conscious posts kind of like this one. yes i guess i'm imitating them a bit. but i love it! that is how the voice in my head sounds. i'm playing "conquering kids" by throw me the statue, a band from seattle. note to self- theyre at the middle east corner on april 8. i'm sad that i'm missing the magnetic fields at somerville theatre on valentines day, so i will go to this show in compensation for that. this group sounds like belle and sebastian and magnetic fields. ok now this post is getting a little too topical. the next thing i should talk about is laundry. how i should do it. maybe the twitching foot and light, poppy music will help. let's be sure to turn up that thermostat to 67 first, though. cuz it's cold here.