Poem: My Missing Skin

I think I left my skin somewhere.
How else to explain
This longing, yearning
To return to

the sea
the sky
the land

To crawl through the undergrowth
Belly-ground touching,
Scales tingling with
Anticipation

Oh, to eat

Unencumbered

To fly, knowing that

This is all there is!

To leap, fully alive,
From the depths and
come crashing down
All thirty glorious TONS of me!

Yes.
There must have been a skin lost.

Perhaps I left it up that tree,
Or in the glade where they
cornered me.
Humiliation has a way of causing
forgetting.

Maybe it is hiding in the corner of some playground,
Under a pile of leaves,
Trying to figure out the teasing
Rules. You, not you. Take
Three.
Big.
Steps.

I slip into it sometimes: one Perfect outfit.
Look into the mirror and sigh with
recognition. Ah, yes! That’s me.

Look at me there! Tall and glorious and
exuberant and loud.

How do we live our lives like this, in
skins two sizes too small? Always afraid of
Moving too fast,
Breathing too deeply,
Stretching too high for fear of

Splitting
The seams.

Don’t Link to Your Blog. Ever.

(Anita: Don’t read this. It’ll just piss you off. This warning is only for Anita. And it’s only on account of you don’t want me to worry so much what other people think. I don’t think it is a generally pissing-off kind of post.)


I have recently started hanging out a fair amount on Google+. I like G+ a lot; the structure of the posts with threading, and the ability to make and find public posts makes it a good place to meet new folks, find new readers, and find new conversational partners. It’s great for that. I go there to look for interesting writers and to post my own links. That’s what I’m there for.

So, yesterday, one of the Big Names (that is to say, somebody whose followers run into the thousands who gets referred to a lot by the other Big Names) that I follow told the people that she follows that she didn’t grant them permission to “pitch” her on their social networks, and said that she wanted us not to post links to our blogs, because if she wanted to read them, she’d be reading them already. Note that this was not a request not to send her links directly, but not to even post them to our public streams because that is like standing on a street corner trying to get people to come into our restaurants. If she wanted the food, she’d come in, already. Then she asked, “What does this bring up in you?”

So, before I go on, let me put this in context. This is part of a wider, “Blogging is dead,” zeitgeist that seems to be developing among the well-established:

Blogging lacks intimacy. People’s posts are either generic or stop short of what they could be if only the writers weren’t feeling confined by their social context. Real writers are sending directly to the inbox, only via permission, and all this blogging people are doing (so 2010) is messing up our public spaces.

Oh. And (from another writer) if people aren’t sharing your writing, it’s probably because it sucks, and if you just keep doing it for a few more years so you’ve had enough life experience and you learn to actually write and have some ideas, then maybe it will be interesting enough for me to bother sending a link your way. (This last one was from a twenty-something online-something expert. He’s single. He travels the world solo. He doesn’t blog any more. It doesn’t meet his needs.)

What does this bring up in me??? 275 posts later I’ve got 25 subscribers and now I’m not even supposed to try and find any new readers? What it brings up in me? I suck. Nobody wants to read my writing. If I were any good, I’d be “successful” by now. How dare I continue to pollute the world with my ideas??? I’ve been compared to a huckster flogging bad food that she crosses the street to avoid. I felt sucker punched. I felt like throwing up.

So, yeah. It brought stuff up.

And then (after several minutes of “I suck” angst) I thought, “How dare she tell me that I’m not allowed to offer my ideas to the world in a public forum? One in which she can make me disappear with a single click of the mouse. If she needs quiet that badly, why is she following all of us???”

The thing is, she writes about non-violent communication and boundaries.

Meditate. Breathe deeply. Talk it out for several hours. Non-violent communication and boundaries. She has the right to ask for something to meet a perceived need in herself. I have the right to say, “No.” I don’t even have to justify my, “no,” but in this case, I will. She has it entirely within her control whether she sees my public posts or not. I don’t have to do anything to change that. In my perception, she has made up a rule about public behaviour, and then applied it to the world around her, and then told us that we are rude for breaking it. I think that her asking me (us) to change my (our) (arguably perfectly reasonable, possibly even intended) behaviour for her comfort crosses a boundary into a presumed intimacy. THIS is why I’m so upset. At least, it is my best guess of why I’m so upset. I’m sure that several hours of therapy could add layers upon layers of upsettedness, but I’ve already spent an entire day on this, and I need to move on now. (This has spawned another entire post about whether blogging is, in fact, dead, or whether some of the super-bloggers, having already reaped its rewards, are maybe not in the best position to declare what the rest of us should be doing… but I digress.)

My online writing and social media use meets some of my needs for social and intellectual connection. I want to talk about strange esoteric things and explore challenging intellectual constructs. I don’t have employment in any of the careers I was trained for. I have three kids. I live in a rural community, which means that I have lots of access to personal interactions, that they know me at the post office, and that the new school principal already knew what my son’s extracurricular interests were. I’m pretty happy with my life. But it does somewhat limit my opportunities to stay up drinking beer and talking about… y’know. Grad school pub stuff. I get my grad school pub stuff by meeting strangers on the internet and striking up a conversation… like in grad school, but with less hand waving. And less beer. And less hand-waving-beer-sloshing. If they (the friends I haven’t met yet) aren’t sharing their links, I will never have the chance to meet them. And if I don’t share my links, my poor little baby ideas will sit here languishing, unread and unloved. Poor ideas. This makes me sad.

Fly little ideas. Make friends! Find other ideas! Make new ideas. (I kind of live in a universe where ideas have form, and it is my responsibility to nourish them the same way I do plants and pets.) And if you don’t want to see my ideas, please look somewhere else, rather than asking me to shut up, no matter how politely you do it.

‘K. Thanks. Bye.

Thinking about Thinking

When this picture was taken, I was actually thinking about trees. Photo credit: D.J. King, (who does some wonderful portraits and lives in Calgary, if you happen to need such a thing.)

You might not be surprised to hear that I’m big on metacognition. It’s one of my things. It might actually be my thing.

I have struggled with this, because in the academic world I was brought up in, one does not become an expert in process, one becomes an expert in object. The topics in most courses are existing thoughts and models of the world, not where those came from or what to do with them. When we write papers, we are expected to summarize the results of our thought processes, not to expose the thought processes themselves. (This mistake tends to lead to such comments on undergrad papers as, “rambling and incoherent.” This may be true. It might alternatively be, “circuitous and experimental.” One is bad writing, the other art. Avant garde or confused? Sometimes only time will tell. Although usually? It’s just bad writing.)

When I was studying physics, I was interested in the experimental methods, not the outcomes of the experiment. I fear that I didn’t care about the crystal structures of halogenated methanes, although the idea that you could use particular methods on particular materials intrigued me. I liked preparing samples, running experiments, figuring out what experiment might work next… but the main body of the work was in analyzing the data, sitting in front of a computer doing the same thing again, and again, and again.

When I was studying education, I was interested in what claims could be made and how to support them. I like teaching. No, I love teaching. I live for the moment that the eyes light up! But I don’t just want to teach the things I already learned. I want to teach people how to learn. Why are doing this? What’s the point?

When I was working with faculty members to develop their courses, I was interested in (and tasked with) the structure, not the content. I designed a course about designing courses. I’m all about the framework.

Until very, very recently, I have considered this a flaw. A failure in my character. An inability to commit to one line of investigation and see it thought to its conclusion. Occasionally, I have despaired. OK. Frequently, I have despaired. I am a generalist, I have said, in a world that rewards specialization. But it’s not quite true. I have been telling myself a false story, one which is attached to a model of The University as The Place where thinkers go. If I can’t find a place there, I can’t be a thinker. More recently, The Media has supplanted The University. If only I could get something published, if only somebody in a place of judgement would deem my thoughts, my writing, my self worthy, my existence would be justified. It would be OK to be a generalist. I would have value in the world.

So here’s a different story for me to consider: I am an expert in metacognition. What have I done for 10,000 hours? I have investigated my own thought processes, the nature of thought, the support of truth claims, the structure of disciplinary knowledge, the construction of coherent models, and the ways in which teachers and students communicate their models to one another. I have constructed and torn down so many possible ways of knowing inside my own head that it’s a constant renovation project. I have thought deeply about thinking. I have been reluctant to make these claims, because they are the landscape of the philosopher, the professor, the specialist in the discipline. I tend to believe that I’m not entitled to form a critique of something until I have succeeded at it, and my strongest critique is of the structures in the education system, particularly the post-secondary education system. And then I think, “Well, maybe I’m just bitter?” I ponder, construct, deconstruct, consider, philosophize… and come back again and again and again to, “People are going to say that I’m just bitter because I couldn’t make it as an academic.”

I still love the university! It has libraries, and theatres, and people to talk to, and frankly, it pays the bills. (“Many of my dearest friends are professors,” she protested feebly.) But honestly? There’s some truth there. I’m a little bitter. I’m a little frustrated that I have never found my path, that I’ve never had a full time permanent job, that I have become an expert in something that everybody says is so valued in our society, but that I can’t seem to find a way of turning it into gainful employment other than by trimming off the majority of the skill and finding a market for the portion that is left. I happen to think that it is wasteful to have me working at a job that only requires a high school diploma. I find myself apologizing for my education, which is both too much and inadequate, depending on where I stand.

Well, no more, I say! I’m thinking about thinking, and I’m proud! My next two posts are going to be titled, “I see your Levinas and raise you a Wittgenstein” (which is about internet comments and the limits of knowledge. I promise it requires no knowledge of either Levinas or Wittgenstein.) and “Why are we here, anyway?” (which is, tangentially, also about internet comments). There will also be, as time goes on, “Writing about Writing”.

All of which is an elaborate precursor to saying that I’m back, and that I’m in transition to taking my own writing seriously as a tool of engagement with the world. I’m willing to be subjective because I’m a subject! I have a position. And part of my position is that we generalists need to find a different way of being in the world, one that doesn’t require us to leave behind, immerse, drown, or amputate parts of our selves. When we judge ourselves by the same standards by which we are judged, those of the specialist and the expert, of course we are found wanting. We can’t change that part of the world, but we don’t have to subject ourselves to it. (See what I did there? Subject/subject. Noun/verb. Actor/acted upon? Oooh! I love when words do that.)

And then we need to find new ways of making a living. Because waiting for the path to appear? That way madness lies.

(I know. I’ve thought about it.)

Analyze This: On Not Giving Stuff Up

This post comes with a caveat: It is an exploration of systems, the limits of agency, and the social constructs that  preclude giving up my car… yet. I am not looking for sympathy, nor am I beating myself up over my limitations in the face of the myths of Western civilization. I recognize that I lead a profoundly charmed life, full of privilege and the leisure to consider these things. It doesn’t escape my awareness that I can only think about this because of the same education that leads to the rest of it all… it’s complicated.

The problem with giving stuff up is that we don’t want to. I mean we may want to, sort of, but it’s often more that we think it’s a good idea, or we think that we will be better people if we do it, or we think that we should (in all the various interpretations of that loaded word.) But to truly give something up, to stop doing something we enjoy merely for the greater good, without getting any benefit back for it… we don’t really want to do that. At least I don’t.

For me, my ideals keep running up against the car/house problem. My house is too far from the things we do. Or the things we do are too far from my house. Since “the things we do” include the work that pays for the house, I’m going to go with the first interpretation in this case. On a daily basis, we travel more than is justifiable, given the things that we know about the effects of that travel. But once I get to that conclusion, I am unable to take the next logical step…

The benefits of our house, even the environmental ones, are enormous. We have a huge food garden, soon to be updated with nearly year-round greenhouse production. We have chickens, and bees, and fruit trees, and berries, and asparagus (I’m still waiting for the first harvest, so the asparagus is surprisingly prominent on the list of things keeping me here.) At the end of our driveway, we have swimming, canoeing, kayaking, or skating, depending on the season. We can go fishing (which means standing on the end of the dock talking about fish, since no fish are silly enough to come in that close to shore.) It’s like being on vacation whenever we get home, or like living at the cottage. Actually, it’s exactly like living at the cottage, since our house is a winterized, converted cottage. This leads  to a couple of quirks, like the fact that the master bedroom is in the basement, and the second bathroom is tucked behind the chimney and has no ceiling.

Back to the pluses of this property: We heat with wood, and we have a huge bank of south-facing windows. We have available wind in abundance and flowing water, so could probably be energy independent on this property with a smaller-than-average investment in renewables… There is also a second garage with apartment above it, and two sheds, one of which contains chickens, and one of which has my writing studio, at least in the summer. This place is awesome (which is why we bought it two hours after we saw it, the day the sign went up.)

But we keep coming back to the cars. There are currently three of them sitting in my parking space. Three! This is awful! (Now, it happens that we just haven’t managed to sell the van, so it’s not that we intend to continue to have three cars for two drivers. That would be silly.) When we get despondent about the house, and the driving, and the repairs, and entropy, and how all this work we are doing is for naught if we just do the opposite of carbon offsetting by driving back and forth to all our environmental and community events… we come around, eventually, to the cars and how else we could solve the transportation problem.

Can we switch to bikes? Well, for about half the days during the one third of the year it is not below freezing on a regular basis. For short trips not involving the 4-lane highway that is the only route to the aforementioned job, that pays the bills. So, not really.

Additionally, I looked at a couple of pedaled cars, since we usually have to take a couple of kids with us, and I’ve come to a conclusion: I am not willing to give up the enclosed roof. It’s not the time it takes me to get somewhere, or the effort involved that stops me. I would adapt, and change my habits to match up. It is the lack of seclusion from the elements that these vehicles provide. I need my stuff (children, car seats, groceries, towels, clothing) not to get wet, and my body not to get frozen. That’s the main thing that I require from my transportation device. It must protect me from the weather, which we get in abundance.

I think there is something more that underlies that, though. I’m not willing to give up the control over my schedule that would come from having to adapt so much more to the weather. As it is, our lives are much more weather-dependent than typical North American expectations. We change the way we heat and cool our house depending on the cloud cover and wind conditions. We must plant, harvest, and do laundry when the sun shines. It is only warm enough to sit outside of an evening occasionally, and I don’t bother to put away my mittens for July and August, in case I want to go for a walk after dark. I live with all of those things. I don’t even mind them. They add a certain… spontaneity to it all. I’m just not ready to start calling our friends and say, “Sorry, we can’t come over this evening. It’s raining.” So if we’re going to replace our cars with bikes, we’ve got to figure out ways to make our bikes drier and warmer.

It isn’t exactly a transportation problem. It’s a social problem. We don’t say, “Oh, my life would be so complete if only I could go those 30 km in the next half hour!” We say, “Stephanie invited us over for dinner. What should we bring?” It’s an entertainment problem: “Did you see that there’s a drama festival on all this week at the university?” It’s an education problem: “The tutor wants to meet us at the library this evening.” It’s a logistics problem: “We’ve got music lessons at 4 and rehearsal at 6, and they are 14 km apart.” It’s a work problem: “I’ve got to stay 45 minutes late to meet with a student who wasn’t able to make it to the exam and the kids have taekwondo before I’ll be home.” It’s a taking-advantage-of-the-weather problem: “It’s not raining! Who wants to go to the beach?!” At the end of it all, it’s a middle-class problem: “I have to. There are all these things I need to do. And what about the children?”

There’s something there to do with expectations. I don’t feel bad that I can’t provide a private jet or regular skiing trips to Europe; those things are so far out of my purview, they don’t even register. I also don’t feel bad about denying my kids access to the skidoos, jetskis, power boats, and ATV’s that are such common weekend activities for the other kids around here: those things are so obviously outside our value system that they exceed my compromise capacity. Also… expensive! Same reasons we have no lawn to speak of. But these activities on the boundary, when I have the ability to provide them, and the activity itself is something I value… they’re gateway activities. Gateway into the car, into the car culture, into fast food, (which I sometimes resort to when desperate for calories when logistics break down) into consumption. The events, the birthday parties, the obligatory gift giving, are all parts of participation in the broader culture, participation in the culture the children are immersed in by going to school. They already don’t get television, elaborate birthday parties, cell-phones, laptops of their own, or the newest gadget from Future Shop. The least I can do (so I reason) is take them to drama classes, taekwondo, and swimming lessons. And the library. And the theatre. And the farmer’s market. And the wildlife park. And the playground. And their friends houses. And… you see how this goes. It’s a good-mother myth, tied up in the package of a successful life, and topped with a bow of synthesized freedom. For the bargain price of $169 (bi-weekly), plus taxes, maintenance, and gasoline. Phew.

And I can analyze it. And I can realize it, and think it, and know it intellectually. But when it comes right down to finally saying, No? I can’t quite give it up.

Greenwashing of the Week

I am hereby bestowing my illustrious “Greenwashing” award, which will be noted by at least 50 people, to the company Future Shop, for their not-quite-stated Earth Day flyer.

It is hard for me to write this, because they have pulled off the most creative and effective form of greenwashing, namely, making a significant financial contribution to one of my preferred environmental organizations. This is a get-out-of-responsibility free card, of sorts, since I find myself reluctant to criticize as a result. Nonetheless…

This is the most literal example of greenwashing I’ve ever seen; each page of the flyer has an actual wash of green in the background, even the pages with plain old consumer electronics. The cover features the statement, “It’s easy being green. (See inside for energy-saving tips and savings.)” This example of greenwashing is audacious, bold, daring! The BlackBerry PlayBook right next to energy saving tips? Genius! Completely unrelated, yet reassuring.

It does get better on later pages, with genuinely useful tips like:

  • Use a front loading washing machine, wash in cold and hang to dry whenever possible. This one I was surprised to see, since they don’t sell clotheslines. Although, since washers and dryers are usually sold in pairs, it probably wouldn’t significantly affect their sales. I might hang my clothes whenever possible, but in a damp cold climate, I’m reluctant to give up the dryer.
  • Also, if you are going to use your dryer, make sure that you run the spin cycle on the washer as high as possible to minimize drying time.
  • Turn off the power to your electronics when they are not in use. (They are kind enough to sell a power bar that will do it for you.)
  • Buy Energy Star appliances and TV’s.
  • Use a rechargeable Universal remote… only $229.99. Let’s you stop using expensive and environmentally unfriendly disposable batteries, apparently. I’m pretty sure that the remote for my 10 year old DVD player has only gone through two changes of rechargeables, actually, so this seems to be an expensive solution to a problem I don’t have.

Which brings me to my real point… green consumerism, and the idea that we can buy our way to sustainability. Don’t get me wrong: if you are planning to buy a new appliance or television, you should consider its power consumption. Keep in mind, however, that the Energy Star designation means that the item is more efficient than a target set for comparable items, not necessarily that it is a low power consumer in absolute terms. If you really want to make a difference, you should choose a smaller TV and watch it less. Or buy a smaller refrigerator.

More important, though, is not trading in those electronics that are still perfectly serviceable to get something newer with a couple more features. Yes, if you have a gas-guzzler, a power-sucking 15 year old fridge, or a computer that looks a lot like a 1980′s space ship, you might reduce your fuel or power consumption by trading in/up. But if you are replacing a working phone, you need to consider the embodied energy, and whether you actually need the new phone.

Need. Hard one, that. What does it mean to “need” when your job might hinge on having that BlackBerry? You might need it. We have expectations. Other people have expectations of us. During the discussion of the Wall Street Salary cap, I read a non-satirical article on how expensive it is to live in New York as an executive. The place of consumer spending was highlighted as a key to maintaining social status, and by extension, continued access to employment. “Each Brooks Brothers suit costs about $1,000. If you run a bank, you can’t look like a slob.” (Apparently they also “need” two $8000 vacations per year, and possibly a $4 million summer home. This is an extreme example, but we are all prey to it in our own ways.) “Going green is good,” says Future Shop. I’m the last one who is going to disagree with that. But I will say that in the face of all the social pressures to the contrary, it isn’t actually easy.

This is how the Future Shop flyer is a greenwashing campaign, no matter how well-intentioned or useful the tips may be. We need to keep in mind the order of these three-R’s: First Reduce. Then Reuse. Then Recycle. The electronics industry, of which the company is a retail arm, has a business model based on stoking/stroking our unknown wants: Make new(ish) technologies (Does the iPhone 4 really change everything. Again?), advertise them so that they become so pervasive that participation is part of the cost of entry to society (or is at least perceived to be). Turn wants into needs, and then sell people the same thing they already bought in a different form, rendering the previous solution that they bought from you obsolete, and therefore garbage. Don’t believe me? How many times have you replaced your movie collection? Was it because you hated your DVD player? Or your VHS? Or your BetaMax? Or your laser disc player? Or was it because somebody told you that they were no longer good enough? Or stopped making that format? On a related note, let me also ask, how much larger is your television than it was 20 years ago? Why is that, do you think? Were you sitting in your living room thinking, “This would be so much better on a TV the size of the wall?” Or was that idea planted in your mind, all unawares?

Before I sign off, I’m going to come back around to the original statement by Future Shop: I suppose that it can be easy being green, if we consider reducing our desires and expectations easy. There are a lot of green choices that are green by default, by inaction. Don’t go on that car trip. Don’t buy that new phone. Don’t buy more clothes than you can actually wear. Pass on the giant TV. (For the cost of the giant TV, you could get a smaller one, AND the solar panels to run it!) Make do with less stuff. Repair, pass things along, buy used if you can. All green choices.But remarkably difficult when a stack of flyers arrives at the end of my driveway every week reminding us how hopelessly out of date all of our stuff is.

The Mythic They

You probably wouldn’t guess it if you are newcomer to my world, but I am, by nature, a rules follower. I was that girl in school – didn’t cut class, got straight A’s, studied all the time, did the readings, followed all the rules. Let’s put it this way: I was the one that the teacher got to do attendance on library day. I just watched a play with highschool kids cutting class, and I found myself thinking, “But why would you do that?” When I was that age, I lived in a world of “They Say,” believing that the clear path to success was demarcated by following the signs. “This way to a high-paying job, a house of your own, and stability.” More than anything else, I wanted somebody just to tell me what to do, let me do it, and give me the reward.

Clearly, I was delusional.

In my own defense, “They” were the adults (and especially the teachers) around me. It was a completely predictable outcome of the school “system”: I was institutionalized. Think critically (but not too much). You can be anything you want (as long as it is on The List of Approved Professions that come with Social Approbation). And then, there was always this: If you step outside the bounds, you will be replaced. Somebody else will be willing to follow these Rules, and you will Fail. No high-paying job, no approval, no stability. Certainly no tropical vacations, summer home, or fancy clothes.

I tried. I tried so hard to follow those rules. I studied engineering instead of science, because “everybody says” you can’t get a decent job with a science degree. You need to be more practical. Do engineering; it’s just like science anyway (it’s not). And there I stayed, even though my friends who were graduating weren’t getting jobs (it was the early 90′s). I stayed until the day that I asked a professor, “Why?” and he said, “You don’t need to know that.” I sat there, thinking, no longer listening to the lecture on my favourite subject of the term. And what I thought was, “Yes, actually. I do need to know that. And if I have to give that up to become an engineer, then I can’t be an engineer.” And I got up, and I left, and I walked over to the physics department, and applied to transfer. Because if I was going to have to give up asking “why?”, and there wasn’t going to be a job at the end of it all, I couldn’t figure out what I was doing it for.

Here was my mistake: I thought I had a contract with the mythic “They”. That somewhere out there, somebody knew what the rules were, and that the adults around me were being kind enough to show me the way. What I didn’t know was that “They” were guessing, and that They had no intention or ability to follow through.

What is worse, these days it seems that They say things and make policy based on what happened when They were young, and then turn to us and say things like, “I can’t believe you haven’t found steady employment when you’re nearly 40. Why haven’t you started saving for retirement? Your generation is so irresponsible.” (Because we are still paying off student loans that we took out because They assured us that an education would pay for itself and there was no risk. I happen to avoided that particular burden by falling through the funding cracks, so, thanks, They for that one.)

They also say things like, “Oh, there is no need for hybrid cars; look how people are still buying the gasoline ones.” Right. See above re: lack of stable jobs and outstanding student debt. Also, no stable access to childcare, astronomical housing prices, spiraling gas costs, food costs, everything else becoming more expensive… and the car costs $40,000. Taxes, freight, blah, blah, blah… $800 per month, even spread over the maximum loan period. And me with no permanent employment for… oh, wait. My entire adult life! Since all that graduate education.

Hey, They! Remember when you decided to outsource all those jobs to the other side of the planet? Remember all that downsizing you’ve been doing since I was about 12 years old? Remember when you decided to replace half your workforce with contractors, and then dump them at the end of each project? Remember all those decisions you made to treat your workers as a disposable expense, and left it up to somebody else to pay their workers enough to buy your products? Only all your friends were doing the same? I’m kind of mad about all that. I sort of don’t want to do your bidding any longer.

So, let me redirect this conversation, because the mythic They have already had quite enough of my life energy. Let me redirect it towards We.  As in, We need a new social contract. We need better ways of making sure that people are fed, clothed, housed, and meaningfully employed. We need a voting system that allows us to actually cast a ballot in favour of something, rather than having to hold our noses and vote strategically. We need some form of story that allows for the possibility that the very way They suggested I define success was misguided. I’m not blaming Them. I don’t even know if They exist. But I’m pretty sure that We do. And I’d rather start working with that. What do We say?

Slowing Down

As I may have mentioned, I have been working on some writing about nuclear power. It started out as a post, and then it turned into a series of posts, but I think it is turning into an e-book in the end, because it is just too large. What I set out to write was a primer for people who were engaging in the nuclear power debate, questions to ask, values to consider. I tried to use my scientific background to be “objective”. Hah. The further I dug, and the more I found out, the worse an idea I found it to be. It turns out (for very well-substantiated reasons) to be a precise recipe for replicating the situation we are now in, 75 years down the road, only worse, because nuclear toxic waste is much, much more toxic than fossil fuel toxic waste. Since I set out with the premise, “I think that the technologies exist to make nuclear power safe, but there are other questions to be addressed, and I will document them,” this is a bleak conclusion, indeed.

If you want a whole stack of primary research documents to work along with me, I can recommend Mark Jacobson’s extensive list of papers. They are not all about nuclear, but a large fraction of them have considered the implications of a range of different energy options. For a weighty and comprehensive summary, you may want his 26 page “Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security.” (Link to page on which the PDF and supplemental material, including his 9-page Scientific American article (pdf), can be obtained.)

If you would rather wait a few weeks, I should have something that summarizes only the nuclear components by the end of May.

***

In the meantime, I would like to propose a non-technological solution to much of our energy crisis: slowing down. This is not merely radical in our culture; it is heretical. The entire economy is built upon growth, and, by extension, speeding up. We must earn more, spend more, go faster, because we could be overtaken by the competition at any time. If you aren’t available to answer your email at 10 at night, you just might be replaced by somebody who is. You need that Blackberry, cell phone, iPad, daytimer, second car, bigger house, nicer clothes, more money than you made last year because if you don’t keep going forward, further, faster, you will be left behind. And we know what happens to the left behind; they become poor, and left out, and die friendless and alone under a bridge… come up gasping for air after that breathless rush from success to homelessness, and vow to work more, and harder, and longer, and anything just to keep from falling behind!

Or take a deep breath and pause. Maybe something else is possible. Maybe, just maybe, this isn’t the only story. Maybe, just maybe, there are other possibilities. Maybe there are other people, making different choices, making something other than speed their highest calling. Maybe. Look around.

Maybe somebody builds a bicycle car, and maybe some people use it to commute to work. Maybe people have purchased smaller houses, scaled back intentionally, moved to the country, or the suburbs, or the city, and started growing food. Maybe some people are choosing to slow down. Maybe you could too.

And even, maybe, if a bunch of us did it together, it would be safe to drive our bicycle cars on the roads, because the roads would slow down, people would drive less, and we would use less energy. Maybe we wouldn’t need as many gadgets to manage our time, because we would have more time in which to manage. Maybe we could stop over-programming our children because we wouldn’t be afraid that they would be left behind before they even got out of elementary school. And maybe, if a lot of us slowed down all together, instead of races (to the top, or the bottom) we could have lives.

On Pickles, Particle Physics, and Work-Life Balance

When I started writing this post, I felt pretty good. I had a great day. I made the pickles that have been sitting in brine for the last 5 days. I wrote about nuclear physics for 2 hours, refreshed my memory on alpha and beta decay, and came up with a good analogy. I had a coffee at an actual coffee shop. I made wine in the morning with my husband, and cookies in the afternoon with my son. I even made it to meditation this evening. It felt spot on.

But when I sat down to write about it, I found myself coming again and again to the same question: if I can do so many things, why can’t I make a decent income? Or, truth be told, any income at all? So I’ve thrown out about 900 words on the topic of work-life balance. Because I don’t know what the answer is. And even though I was willing to call writing my work when I started this post, I can’t write any more this evening, because I’m having a serious case of The Frauds.

Crab Bucket

I was reading a Terry Pratchett book the other day (Unseen Academicals) and I came across the phrase, “Oh, it’s all crab bucket down there.” Fortunately, Terry Pratchett was so kind as to explain this to the character in question (although not until later in the book.) It was an expression I hadn’t previously heard, although after it was explained, I got something else. I’ll get back to you with that.

Anyway, later in the book, the character is purchasing fish, and the vendor offers her a crab, and says, “Oh, you can keep crabs in an open container, because as soon as one starts to climb out, the others all drag them back in.”

The character then starts seeing the crab bucket all around her, and the ways in which she tries to keep other people down, because of rules that don’t really exist. It is the power of the unwritten rules, also (in more academic terms) termed discipline. Foucault talked about the ways in which we develop a little prison guard in our own heads, because at any time we might be watched. We follow the unwritten rules out of fear of imagined repercussions. And it becomes all crab bucket.

And what finally clicked for me was what the heck this song meant. Or at least a little bit of it. And a fine song it is, too.

Happy Saturday. I have a party to go to!

On scripts, social performance, and knowing your place in the world

We are all born naked. The rest is drag.” Rupaul*

We have these dual drives within, for Society and Self. Acceptance and Agency. We hear the messages: Strive… but not too high, or you will become vain. Succeed… within these boundaries. Find your tribe, and then stick with them. They know the ropes.

But we all secretly know: I am not my tribe. I am not even the sum of my tribes. There are things I want that fall outside these narrowly prescribed rules.

Within, and below, and beneath the striving to belong is a longing to be. To use the gifts, the talents, the knowledge and ways of seeing that are unique to you. To express the deepest yearnings of the heart, for beauty, for adventure, for authenticity.

How do you respond when the deepest yearnings of your heart don’t match the script that has been carefully developed for you over millennia of social conditioning? What if you were born in a body that doesn’t match your heart, if you don’t meet the expectations of masculinity, or femininity, or the standing or tradition you arrived in? How do you reconcile this longing to be with this desire to belong?

This is one of the hardest things I have to confront when raising children. My belonging, my be-longing, and those of each other member of my family sometimes come into conflict. How much am I willing to compromise to fit in? How much more am I willing to compromise to help my children fit in? How do I help my children negotiate the same problems?

A couple of months ago, I wrote a piece for the Natural Parents Network on how to respond when other parents say, in essence, “You’d better teach them how the real world works before somebody else does.” This translates, in my experience, to, “Why aren’t you making that kid act like all the other kids???” and particularly, like all the other boys. In that piece, I said, “

If we are going to undermine the assumption that power-over is the only way to live, and that self-repression for the comfort of others is the correct choice, we need to make different choices. If we really believe in our children and their right to autonomy, we need to support them and provide them with the resilience to stand up in the face of domination. [Edit: even our own] Which means that we need to help them think in extremely sophisticated manners, far before the age that they would normally be expected to.

Making my kids act like all the other kids is fairly far down my list of priorities, (even though I did promise my sister that I would camouflage them.)

Because I like to reason from the general to the specific and back again, let me give you an example. For several years, my eldest son had long hair – not Justin Bieber-like, shaggy, 1970′s Brady bunch hair. Long. Ponytail down his back, would be the envy of the girls in high school and beyond. And he regularly got flack over it at school, but he held onto it, insistently. “That’s their problem. I like it this way.” And he did that for years, but one day, it all became too much. He got tired of resisting the pressure, tired of being called a girl (another problem entirely), tired of having people link his hair length with his lack of athletic ability… and he came home and asked to have it cut short. He chose to conform, but he did so quite intentionally. He’s willing to concede on the hair issue, but he still insists on dressing his own way. His own way is relatively conservative, and tends to involve striped polo shirts and jeans. He has been quite explicit that he dresses this way because he doesn’t want anybody to think he might be cool. He isn’t interested in doing the ‘dumb’ things that make you cool. His words, not mine. He has figured out (some of) The Unwritten Rules.

***

There are things we know intuitively about fitting in. Dress a certain way, talk a certain way. Even our gestures are regulated by our gender, class, and social status. All is in aid of making it simpler for others to categorize us so that they know how to treat us. We don’t want to interact with human beings; it’s too much work. We want to interact with roles. I say this, you say that… we all follow our scripts, and the interaction goes smoothly. This is the tacit agreement of our culture. You must act appropriately so that people know how or whether to bother with you or not.

Which is where transgression comes into all of this. Answer the question, “How are you?” honestly and the script breaks down. It becomes an actor’s nightmare: Nobody knows their next line. The social lubrication of chit-chat is eroded as the set falls away. So we lie. Because we know that we aren’t really having a human interaction. We are playing our part in an elegantly designed scene.

I used to experience this daily as I went to my professional job in the city from a one-bedroom house that had bare studs and my (thrift store) suits hung on a dowel against an unfinished wall. My job costume didn’t match my ‘real’ life.

“How are you?”

I’m on the verge of a nervous breakdown because my commute plus childcare costs over 80% of my monthly income but Social Services thinks I should be able to get to and from Toronto for $100 a month so they won’t give me any subsidy, and I don’t know how I’m going to make my next mortgage payment, let alone buy groceries this week.

“Fine, thanks.”

“Spare change?”

Don’t make eye contact, because the last time you did you burst into tears and the panhandler was even more uncomfortable than you were.

Head shake, averted eyes.

“How was your birthday?”

Please don’t look at me. My suit only cost $7, and I’m a complete fraud, and the computer in the laptop case belongs to somebody else, and I’m $50,000 in debt even though I stopped eating meat 4 years ago and haven’t had a glass of wine since my last anniversary.

“Fine, thanks. How was your weekend?”

This was the role I was trained for. Educated professional women do not have financial crises, and when they do, they keep it secret. They certainly don’t break down in public. They wear nice conservative suits in nice conservative colours, and show up for work every day no matter how bad things are at home. They play their script out as assigned.

***

What if I told you that I don’t know my lines any more? Here I am, “being” a soccer (taekwondo) mom, but I lack the motivation. I can dress the part, but I can’t even pretend to hold up my end of the social contract. I understand the drama, I’ve even read the script, but I see so many bigger problems that I just can’t take my role seriously. “How are you?” “Fine thanks.” Avert your eyes. End the conversation.

Frequently I wonder, what if I did this differently? “How are you?” “Oh. I’m concerned about global warming and the situation in the middle east. I’m a little worried about the fact that we only have three days worth of food on the island. I’m absolutely convinced that our use of technology has outstripped our wisdom as a species. And I think that the social contracts we have made with the corporate elite are breaking down in such a way that the long term sustainability of our entire economic system is in question. But I have a roof overhead and food on my plate, so I’m going along with things for now because I don’t really see another way out.” Actually, I suspect a lot of the other “soccer moms” think that, but it is considered rude to speak it aloud. Especially at a birthday party at McDonald’s.

So I fall back on, “Pretty good. Car broke down three times in the last month, though.” Murmurs of sympathy all ’round. Discussion ensues about mileage and the shocking (shocking, I tell you) price of gas. And thus is the status quo maintained, even by me. Yet I find myself more comfortable in transgressive spaces. I would rather have human interactions, and make things up as I go than keep playing these parts. I am less and less able to maintain superficial conventions, even if I am still appropriately attired. In an observation of extreme irony, I find that I primarily do it for the perceived benefit to my children in an immediate social situation. Even though by doing so I’m tacitly perpetuating the very systems of oppression that I wish to see broken down for their benefit.

In the end, I find I have no solutions. Not tonight. Not when the snow is coming down, and dinner hasn’t been made, and I still have banking to do, and the kids need some time with Mummy. But one of the things my partner and I have found very beneficial in making a more honest relationship is calling a weasel a weasel. And here I spy a weasel.

___

*Interestingly enough, I got this quote from the same English professor with whom I had the conversation about obviousness in intellectual exercises.

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