the tundrah blog

so, i don't feel like i have much to say today, but i was inspired to post after perusing some blogs yesterday. i'd like to keep more on top of this thing, but i'm a little overwhelmed with how many responsibilities i have on my plate right now. i have to learn to say no when i'm asked to do something (ie. play soccer, be on the HOA board, mentor someone, take on other people's job duties, etc.).

work is fine. a complete trainwreck and yet i dont know what else i'd be doing. i have a goal ruminating in my head... i think in five years i either want to be a lot further up the food chain in my current industry, or out of it all together. i feel like while what i'm doing is fun/cool for me personally, that i'm not really doing anything to benefit society in general. i do still think i'm very lucky that i love my world and the people i get to work with, but in general i'd like to feel like what i'm working on will have a positive impact on someone's life.

i read a book recently which has not only changed my view of food, but also a lot of other things as well. its called "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto". it describes how our food chain and food availability has developed due to economic and societal needs, and what impact that is having on our health. its amazing. maybe the main reason i'm buying into it is because his whole credo is basically how i was raised to eat: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." By "food" he means things your grandmother (or even great grandmother) would recognize as food. Not Monster Energy drinks, not Go-gurt, not Cup-o-Noodle, not Lean Cuisine. I was lucky enough to grow up with a mom who cooked. We ate family meals every night and while we were by no means strict health nuts, for the most part junk and pre-prepared food didnt exist much around our house. i highly recommend it even if you dont consider yourself much of a foodie.

people who know me well know i'm a closet hippie, but i'm not kidding when i keep saying i want to eventually live off the grid. i'd love to make less of a footprint on this world by producing at least some of not all of my own energy and food. my goals of leaving work and living a healthier and more environmentally sensitive lifestyle may merge eventually. we'll see.

you can take the (closet) hippie out of Santa Cruz, but somehow....

well hello blog...

wow. here i am, almost a year and a half later, and after battling with blogger to start a new email account and all that nonsense. this time i promise to post a real post (those were my aversion tactics 'cause i didn't feel i had much to talk about).

i am still alive and in a very different place than i was during that last post. i do plan to keep this thing limping along in respect to the fact that it has chronicled my movements over the last--jeez, 6 i think, without looking at my archives--years. its fun for me to go way back and look at what i wrote right before moving to Idaho (terrified and inexperienced), then during my time there (unawares of how good i had it at work, but truly wanting to come home), and during my early phase of being back at home in Cali (unsure of what was going to happen next).

so here i am again (on my own--yeah! throwing horns)... the short version is:
- i bought an amazing condo with Pete. i LOVE our house. i call it a house, 'cause thats more of what it is than a condo. i've coveted living in this complex for many years (Eryn & his dad lived here right after we got out of college). i'm good at making home-related things happen. so, i'm lucky in that regard.. we are scraping by to make it happen, but i'd rather be poor and living in a space i love than the alternative. living environment and "sense of home" are abnormally important to me.
- i got a job about a year ago working for another eyewear company. great brand, great co-workers, bad upper management. we shall see what happens. same job as before, but more responsibility. learning the nuances of being a business person. i totally "get" marketing--what i don't always get is how to win battles intelligently and not by force. i'd love to take a business/speaking/negotiation class as people seem to think that i am negative when really i'm just trying to fight the good fight. yesterday, pending some things outside of our direct control happening, my boss told me he has bigger things in store for me. that could be good. oh yeah, and work is, um, about 3 miles from my house. cant complain there....
- we have a dog. a SMALL dog. anyone who knows me (or Pete for that matter), knows that that is like hell freezing over. but he is awesome. we lost my cats and i was completely destroyed, especially so with Sake. so, after 5 years of having a friend to come home to, we needed another one. this time it arrived in the forn of a crazy hybrid-chihuahua-mutt. he is amazing and entertaining and definitely special needs. but we love him.

those are the big things. i'll start venting and ranting the details soon enough.

good to see you blog. see you soon (and not in the "yeah, i'll call you" sort of way).
xoxo

interesting exerpt from Cary Tennis of Salon. i cut out the beginning (a letter from someone whom had just been horribly dumped, and the very beginning of his response), but i think this stands on its own, even somewhat out of context. good food for thought.

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The truth seems too cruel to say.

So we go on talking just to calm your nerves, to make some music you can listen to as you grieve.

We don't say that the reason for your misfortune is that the gods are bitchy and full of shit, that they are crazy, sick motherfuckers, that the gods spit on us when they're drunk and curse us when they're mad. We don't mention what is actually known to be true, that although sometimes in some places the gods intervene on our behalf, just as often they get lost and don't show up, that they fight among themselves instead of attending to our wishes, that they look at us with interest and sometimes with lust but only rarely with pity, that instead of offering us protection they scheme to have us for themselves no matter what havoc it causes down here! They couldn't care less! They are gods!

We tend to think only of the good gods, the ones that offer us bountiful harvests and invent intricate bees. It's a habit from childhood, when we were taught to think of one good god, when although we dreamed of monsters we were told that god was watching out for us, that there weren't really any monsters there in the closet, that they weren't really crawling around up there in the space between ceiling and roof. No responsible adult would have thought to teach us that among the gods are horrible nasty fucks that would just as soon sprinkle cancer seeds in a womb as devise a perfect delivery of a perfect little baby.

So we grew up with fairy tales, misunderstanding the nature of power, thinking power came with the good. Ha!

So these sick motherfuckers like to screw with us all, and they wait until we're pretty soft and trusting because it amuses them no end to see our horrified expressions when the things we love are crushed in impossibly strange ways, when our cells turn against us and buses lose their brakes, when sisters collapse in warm Hawaiian waters for apparently no reason, when strong minds go amok like frayed, sparking wires. They love it.

We live on the fragile edge of annihilation, imperfectly sheltered from the void, open to the sky and to the asshole motherfucker gods who fuck with us night and day for their own amusement. We pray to a kind and loving insurance god who sometimes provides coverage but who just as often excludes on technicalities the calamities that befall us, looking the other way when he should be watching out for us. And this too amuses the asshole motherfucker gods, who may be many things but are not stupid or naive.

It isn't even so much the dying that we can't handle, it's the surprise, the betrayal, the way you think you'll be OK until they yank the rug out and laugh.

So what do we do? We toughen up. We quit playing patty-cake patty-cake give a dog a bone, we season ourselves, we take the bit in our teeth, we flog ourselves with birch branches, we bitch and moan and howl at the moon and give up our illusions of a soft loving god who hears our prayers and answers them. We board the windows and doors. We wise up and face the fuckers, we quit lying down and taking it, we let go of our prettiness, we prepare for the battle ahead. We say never again will we be caught off guard, never again will we pretend, never again will we believe that this thing we have created cannot be poisoned in an instant by a shit-head god on a bender, fucking up our paradise for his shallow and grim amusement.

Never again will we believe in fairy tales.

We were taught a lot of silly things as kids. Only later would we learn what pleasure the gods take in disrupting our plans; only later would we learn how minuscule are our options, how puny our plans of defense; only later would we learn there's not a whole lot we can do except rub stone in our eyes, interrogate our lovers mercilessly, place fierce guards at entrances and exits.

That's no consolation, really, is it. It's just the truth. You're wiser now though black and blue, sobbing in the firelight, waiting for dawn.


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Not so smart when it comes to the Middle East
By Lou Dobbs
CNN


NEW YORK (CNN) -- We Americans like to think we're a pretty smart people, even when evidence to the contrary is overwhelming. And nowhere is that evidence more overwhelming than in the Middle East. History in the Middle East is everything, and we Americans seem to learn nothing from it.

President Harry Truman took about 20 minutes to recognize the state of Israel when it declared independence in 1948. Since then, more than 58 years of war, terrorism and blood-letting have led to the events of the past week.

Even now, as Katyusha rockets rain down on northern Israel and Israeli fighter jets blast Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon, we simultaneously decry radical Islamist terrorism and Israel's lack of restraint in defending itself.

And the U.S. government, which wants no part of a cease-fire until Israel is given every opportunity to rescue its kidnapped soldiers and destroy as many Hezbollah and Hezbollah armaments as possible, urges caution in the interest of preserving a nascent and fragile democratic government in Lebanon. Could we be more conflicted?

While the United States provides about $2.5 billion in military and economic aid to Israel each year, U.S. aid to Lebanon amounts to no more than $40 million. This despite the fact that the per capita GDP of Israel is among the highest in the world at $24,600, nearly four times as high as Lebanon's GDP per capita of $6,200.

Lebanon's lack of wealth is matched by the Palestinians -- three out of every four Palestinians live below the poverty line. Yet the vast majority of our giving in the region flows to Israel. This kind of geopolitical inconsistency and shortsightedness has contributed to the Arab-Israeli conflict that the Western world seems content to allow to perpetuate endlessly.

After a week of escalating violence, around two dozen Israelis and roughly 200 Lebanese have died. That has been sufficient bloodshed for United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to join in the call for an international security force, ignoring the fact that a U.N. force is already in Southern Lebanon, having failed to secure the border against Hezbollah's incursions and attacks and the murder and kidnapping of Israeli soldiers.

As our airwaves fill with images and sounds of exploding Hezbollah rockets and Israeli bombs, this seven-day conflict has completely displaced from our view another war in which 10 Americans and more than 300 Iraqis have died during the same week. And it is a conflict now of more than three years duration that has claimed almost 15,000 lives so far this year alone.

An estimated 50,000 Iraqis and more than 2,500 American troops have been killed since the insurgency began in March of 2003, which by some estimates is more than the number of dead on both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict over the past 58 years of wars and intifadas.

Yet we have seen no rescue ships moving up the Euphrates for Iraqis who are dying in their streets, markets and mosques each day. French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has not leaped to Baghdad as he did Beirut. And there are no meetings of the Arab League, and no U.S. diplomacy with Egypt, Syria and Jordan directed at ending the Iraqi conflict.

In the Middle East, where is our sense of proportion? Where is our sense of perspective? Where is our sense of decency? And, finally, just how smart are we?

Sex is essential, kids aren't
Why are 30% of German women choosing to go childless? Free will, baby.
By David P. Barash
DAVID P. BARASH is a professor of psychology at the University of Washington.

May 10, 2006 (from the LA Times)

THE GERMAN PUBLIC was recently shocked to learn that 30% of "their" women are childless — the highest proportion of any country in the world. And this is not a result of infertility; it's intentional childlessness.

Demographers are intrigued. German nationalists, aghast. Religious fundamentalists, distressed at the indication that large numbers of women are using birth control.

And evolutionary biologists (including me) are asked, "How can this be?" If reproduction is perhaps the fundamental imperative of natural selection, of our genetic heritage, isn't it curious — indeed, counterintuitive — that people choose, and in such large numbers, to refrain from participating in life's most pressing event?

The answer is that intentional childlessness is indeed curious — but in no way surprising. It is also illuminating, because it sheds light on what is perhaps the most notable hallmark of the human species: the ability to say no — not just to a bad idea, an illegal order or a wayward pet but to our own genes.

When it comes to human behavior, there are actually very few genetic dictates. Our hearts insist on beating, our lungs breathing, our kidneys filtering and so forth, but these internal-organ functions are hardly "behavior" in a meaningful sense. As for more complex activities, evolution whispers within us. It does not shout orders.

People are inclined to eat when hungry, sleep when tired and have sex when aroused. But in most cases, we remain capable of declining, endowed as we are with that old bugaboo, free will. Moreover, when people indulge their biologically based inclinations, nearly always it is to satisfy an immediate itch, whose existence is itself an evolved strategy leading to some naturally selected payoff. A person doesn't typically eat, for example, with the goal of meeting her metabolic needs but to satisfy her hunger, which is a benevolent evolutionary trick that induces the food-deprived to help out their metabolism.

For more than 99.99% of their evolutionary history, humans haven't had the luxury of deciding whether to reproduce: simply engaging in sex took care of that, just as eating solved the problem of nutrition. But then something quite wonderful arrived on the scene: birth control. Because of it, women (and men) can exercise choice and, if they wish, save themselves the pain, risk and inconvenience of childbearing and child-rearing, indulging themselves rather than their genetic posterity.

Add to this another important observation from nature. Behavioral ecologists distinguish between what are known as "r" and "K" strategies among living things. Thus, "r" strategists — such as mice and rabbits — breed early and often, producing large numbers of offspring that suffer high mortality. "K" types — such as elephants and whales — breed later and relatively rarely, producing fewer offspring (with lower mortality) and investing more in each. Neither elephants nor whales send their children to college, although they indulge in the animal equivalent.

Pretechnological human beings are comparatively "r" in their reproductive style. But with improved socioeconomic conditions — especially, better educational and vocational opportunities for women — comes the demographic transition, whereby "r" gives way to "K," and infant mortality plummets along with birthrate. There also arises a tendency to take especially good care of the fewer children one produces, as well as a greater inclination to look out for No. 1, sometimes — horror of horrors! — by producing no children at all.

It happens over and over, from Nigeria to Nicaragua. Even the already low birthrates in developed countries become lower still when each child is expected to be outfitted with an iPod and yoga lessons, not to mention a personal trainer. It is notable that child-wariness is not only characteristic of highly developed Germany (and northern Europe as a whole), but that it rises from 30% to more than 40% among German women who are college graduates.

When it comes to our behavior, evolution is clearly influential. Of this there can be no doubt. But only rarely is it determinative, even when something as deeply biological as reproduction is concerned. Indeed, the trend toward childlessness is neither particularly German nor strangely "un-biological" but profoundly human.

its been a while. looks like its time for some GK...

Remembrance of things past
Modern living is very civilized, but sometimes I long to buy some smokes, lock the kids in the laundry room and crank the Sinatra.
By Garrison Keillor

Jun. 14, 2006 | Times have changed, and I know this because I have children, two of them, one born in the old days and one in modern times. One was born back before seat belts, when a child might ride standing up in the front seat next to Daddy as he drove 75 mph across North Dakota, and nobody said boo, though nowadays Daddy would do jail time for that and be condemned by all decent people. My younger child rides in a podlike car seat, belted in like a little test pilot. She likes it.

The older child grew up inhaling clouds of secondary smoke, and the younger one lives in a house in which nobody ever thinks about smoking, though sometimes a guest has lurked in the backyard like a convicted sex offender, and consumed a cigarette. The elder child was raised on hamburgers and hot dogs; ground meat was our friend; melted cheese made everything taste better. The younger one lives in the House of Organic Leaves, where beef is viewed with suspicion, as if it might contain heroin. The younger one's rearing was guided by a 10-foot shelf of books by psychologists. The older one was raised by pure chance.

I don't miss the old days. Well, actually I do, sometimes. I miss the jolliness. We had lovely illusions in the old days. We felt giddy and free in that speeding car. The cigarette was a token of our immortality. We chowed down on whatever tasted good. We thrived on ignorance. We all were a little jiggly around the waist and didn't worry about it. My in-laws were suburban Republicans who kicked off family dinners with hefty Manhattans, which eased the social strain considerably. After two, my father-in-law and I got almost chummy. He knew I was a Democrat and a heretic in suburbia; in the gentle mist of bourbon, it began to matter less and less. They won't tell you this at Hazelden, but alcohol can be a real mercy sometimes.

Now here we are in the age of too much information. The landscape lined with guardrails. Warnings on everything: "Do not touch when hot." "Sharp: may penetrate skin if pressed." "Open with an extreme sense of foreboding." Security men in fake uniforms stand in a stupor in every mall. A safety cap secures your shampoo bottle. Every week the use of some ordinary thing is found to have potentially horrible consequences.

I'm a parent and anxiety comes with the territory, but it gets to be a burden. Last week, on pure impulse, I drove to my office with my seat belt unfastened. I just did it. Just for the cheap thrill of it. I ignored the warning buzzer. It made me feel young again. I never told anyone this. You're the first.

I imagine going to the doctor one day, and he comes in with the X-rays, a shadow across his handsome features, and he says, "It's disseminated fibrillation of the fantoids. You have six months, maybe eight. There's nothing we can do except make you comfortable."

"Not a problem," I say. "I can make myself comfortable." I head for the nearest grocery and ask for a carton of Luckies. The lady is horrified. She hasn't sold those coffin nails in a coon's age. I walk home with the smokes under my arm and people see me and try to intervene. They hand me pamphlets. They recite the statistics. "Cancer schmancer," I say. "When your number's up, it's up." I light one and my entire nervous system jingles like it's Christmas.

I locate the martini glasses, which had been used for fingerpaints, and I chill them, and I shake up the gin and vermouth in a pitcher of ice, and put on a Sinatra CD, and word gets around. The neighbors come over. They've been slaves to the brutal schedule of their children's social, educational, spiritual, recreational and therapeutic activities, with scarcely a free moment for themselves. "How about it?" I say. "Lock the little buggers in the laundry room and let's party. If they get put into foster care, so be it." I pour us each a stiff drink and slap some beef on the grill, and we have ourselves a whee of a time.

I have myself a reasonably good time on a regular basis, but I haven't wheed in years. Please don't write to me about this. Don't tell me about yoga. I'm not about to go over the edge. I just like to look, that's all.

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As Gas Prices Soar, the Marketplace Reacts
Viewpoint: While Washington dithers, consumers are changing their habits— and Jimmy Carter is having the last laugh
By NANCY GIBBS

This was an interesting weekend to go car shopping. We had concluded it was time to replace our trusty Subaru, which after long and faithful service deserved a dignified retirement. So we trolled Consumer Reports and headed off for some test drives, sniffed at the Mazda 3, petted an Impreza, focused on a Focus before falling for the Honda Civic — which thanks to its redesign looks nifty, drives nicely, has more airbags than you can count and, above all, gets 40 mpg on the highway.

But when I went back to one of the Honda dealers this weekend, I found that the Civics had virtually vanished. You may be able to find one, the salesman said, but you'll pay sticker for it, or even a premium above the manufacturer's suggested retail price.

"I don't know what happened," he mused. "All winter long we're selling SUVs, and no one ever asks about the gas mileage. But this week practically everyone who came in here wanted to know, 'What gets the best mileage?' We've never had that happen before. I had nine Civics on the lot last week. I have one left, and I don't know if Honda can make them fast enough."

Even accounting for the blarney of salesmen who will always make their product precious and scarce so you think you'd better act quickly, this still struck me as a harbinger of... something. New York City's northern suburbs, where I live, are home to women who until recently were waiting for the day they could trade their Ford Expedition for an Excursion, maybe some day an Extravaganza that was even more impossible to park. We may shop at Whole Foods and buy hormone-free milk for the kids, but natural sensitivity and ecological awareness stopped at the garage door. As a neighbor once explained to me, when she was behind the wheel of her Expedition, it was the only time she felt completely in control. And as long as gas was cheap, there was no incentive to do anything different, beyond the moral imperative to be good environmental citizens.

But something seemed to change in the conversation over the recent weeks of spring when the warnings about drooping glaciers syncopated with the news of rising energy prices. People aren't about to wait for politicians to take the lead: now it's every buyer, furnace owner and bill payer for himself. One neighbor called me to compare utility bills, to see whether gas or oil was more horrifying. A survey by Standard and Poor's found that family restaurants in the Midwest were hurting because people had decided to eat out less. There's a four-month wait for a Toyota Prius (60 mpg) in south Florida, and a Cadillac dealer was giving away $500 gas cards. A Rhea County school district in Tennessee cancelled classes for two days to save $4000 on fuel for the school buses. People in California talked about switching to motorcycles to get to work.

This time, when politicians reacted as politicians typically do, the public reaction was scathing. Republican senators proposed sending a $100 rebate check to embattled drivers, like an IOU for their collective failure to think seriously about an actual energy policy. Noting the generally derisive response to this plan, the New York Times got to quote Rush Limbaugh on the front page: "What kind of insult is this?" he asked. "Instead of buying us off and treating us like we're a bunch of whores, just solve the problem." But pretty much everyone admitted that none of the proposed solutions would go very far toward doing that. "All too often in the past, the American people have been bought off with short-term political Band-Aids that haven't addressed the real issues." That was Dick Cheney talking to reporters in 2001, a few weeks after he declared in a speech that "conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy."

On purely political grounds, you can understand his instinct. Jimmy Carter tried to make energy conservation into a great crusade. He had only been in office a few months when he summoned the nation on the evening of April 18, 1977, saying he needed to have "an unpleasant talk" with the American people. He was about to present Congress an energy plan that he said was sure to be unpopular; but given a finite supply and growing demand, failure to take action would invite "a national catastrophe." "With the exception of preventing war," he said, "this is the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes. The energy crisis has not yet overwhelmed us, but it will if we do not act quickly." He went on to establish the strategic petroleum reserve, pushed for higher fuel economy standards and better home insulation, boosted research into renewable energy sources and had solar panels installed on the White House grounds to heat the water. During his presidency imports of foreign oil fell and exploration into alternative fuels rose. The amount of electricity coming from oil generation dropped from 20% to 3%.

But having a vision is one thing, selling it another. The effort, he said, would require "the moral equivalent of war," which his critics took to referring to that as MEOW. They derided his "Voice of Doom" speech. He was wearing a sweater. He said to turn the heat down to 68. Listening to him over time was enough to make voters want to hibernate until Reagan came into office, declared morning in America, removed the solar panels, savored an oil glut that drove prices down below $10 a barrel in 1986 and postponed the day of reckoning.

So it was understandable that as both a former oilman and a natural politician, George Bush ran in 2000 on the argument that the problem was not too much consumption but too little production. When Al Gore suggested a range of tax breaks for everything from solar heat battery-powered cars, Dick Cheney called the ideas "goofy." During the Administration's first year, when Cheney's energy task force was developing its proposals, he tapped into the deep well of America's romance with freedom, frontiers, escape, extravagance, rebellion: anything other than Carter's clenched, cold vision of duty and darkness and austerity. "If you want to leave all the lights on in your house, you can," Cheney declared. "There's no law against it" — other than the laws of the market. "You will pay for it obviously, in the price." But it is your right as an American to be as wanton as your conscience and budget permits. Cajoling people into conservation was not going to be part of the script. "I think they ought to be able to make that decision for themselves, as individuals," Cheney told reporters in 2001. "And different people have different interests and different value systems."

That tone changed, of course, as prices spiked, and Bush over time began talking about conservation and carpooling and limiting non-essential travel. But as Carter found nearly 30 years ago, moral exhortation doesn't get you very far. Nor did the appeal to reason, prudence, responsibility to our children and theirs. Cheney may turn out to be the one who understood human nature best, that the market has no scruples but great judgment, and change comes when individuals are finally forced to pay attention to something that affects them directly, every day.

A CNN/USA Today poll found that nearly three out of four people think President Bush is not doing enough to solve the energy problem. A Pew poll found that 86% favor raising fuel standards, 82% want more federal funding for solar, wind and hydrogen technology, 68% want more investment in mass transit. Jacob Weisberg, writing in Slate about how high gas prices is "a subject that makes congressmen stupid," notes the illogic of Democrats who deplore high prices but also demand progress towards alternative fuels and more efficient cars, as though the first does not drive the second. Given political history, given how spooked and captive and craven lawmakers have been, it looks like people aren't going to wait for Washington to require Detroit to clean up its fleet, or for prices to come down.

It's almost enough to make you swallow hard and accept the $45 bite when you stop at the gas station, because markets bring pain and consolation together: if this goes on long enough, U.S. auto makers are sure to build less wasteful vehicles because that's what people will be buying, and fuel cells and solar power and windmills will all look more cost effective; when more of us take the train instead of driving to work the traffic will improve, if we switch to hybrids the air will clear, if we tap the sun our dependence on nasty or undependable countries for their oil will diminish, and Jimmy Carter's dreams will come true, 30 years later.