Thesis Check-In #1

August has arrived. Oh god. Time to freak out.

I have wasted a lot of time this summer in hedonistic folly -- organizing my music collection and downloading new gems with Zune, getting lost in Google Reader (with the fantastic ease it allows for stocking up on information overload!), uploading and rearranging photos, doing small creative tasks, sleeping long hours, and otherwise avoiding the big scary things that do absolutely need to get done. This is supposed to be a catch-up summer, a thesising summer, a productivity summer. And now I'm down to a third of it. Gosh darn it, I went and shot myself in the foot again!

This afternoon, I took my thesis binder out to my little haven in the backyard and reread my thesis self-evaluation, proposed second semester schedule, and drafts. I have two common reactions to my old writing. When I read the stuff, some of it completely disgusts me. Yet I also look at some of that forgotten writing and feel impressed by it, impressed in a way reserved for others' writing, new and unfamiliar (having written some of it in a flash, no wonder that I end up having as little familiarity with it as the next person).

I had planned when I started the thesis process at the beginning of the year (late January, immediately after my return from Senegal) to put up what I conceptualized as "essay seeds" on a routine schedule, with the idea that I would then, over the summer, use any feedback I had elicited to edit them into second drafts, a little less rough. That didn't exactly transpire.

Because I have so much I care about, the essay framework for my thesis seemed as though it would give me the necessary room to cover a tremendous wealth of information. But then I actually started the process. It is even more brutal than I could have imagined, dreading it for all the preceding years, knowing that my words would wind up frozen in the library for years after my senior year had ended. I wanted to write a thesis I could take pride in, that I would not regret for years afterward. But dang, what a treacherous journey! I thought I could transform caring about almost everything into a workable thesis, but it turns out caring about so much can be caring about too much, when you have a finite amount of text and when you want to share the basic importance of your work with a reader (or three, or five) with a Ph.D.. You have to whittle away to the most important thoughts you want them to see. Yup, it's an aggravating mind-game.

I thought I would have a mix of essay lengths, some as short as a page like those of Daniel Quinn in Beyond Civilization, some medium length like those of the famous essayists (Montaigne, Eric Hoffer, Lewis Thomas), some full-out almost chapter-length. Each short essay I intended was deceptively so. I cannot, for the life of me, predict how long a project will take (in time or in words!). This has been re-affirmed through the thesis and in other ways throughout this last year. Every little thing I wanted to do in each essay would expand into a whole little world of its own, with its own individualized galactic bibliography. Either I now have to break those seemingly short essays down into even smaller chunks, actually bite-sized this time, or I have to modify the totalizing scope of the work.

I came up with such a half-trimmed rubric a couple weeks ago, based on the ghastly idea, "If I only wrote ten essays, what would those essays be?" Ten essays, ten chapters, same thing, right? Grrr...I will no longer have a unique approach if I go with my thesis advisor's idea of thinking of my thesis as chaptered, like every other cut-and-dried social science thesis (Perhaps his idea of a chapter isn't as big as I think it is; I did see a thesis with sections, two to four pages long). Ten essays ten pages each. If I finish the drafts for most of them before January, I can spend most of my second thesis semester polishing them up into that something I can take pride in, that something I can appreciate, something I can bear to have out in public, in its permanent place in the school library. But if I want to do that, I have to get to work, after all of that foolish dawdling.

I'm thinking about trying to get an introduction drafted this week, even though the whole has hardly come together. After all, this is one of my advisor's suggestions, that I start with an introduction that explains my rationale for bringing such disparate topics together. The thing is, for me, it all ties together without feeling initially disjointed, and it frustrates me that I have to divide up into pieces something that makes sense holistically, only to show how I stitched it all back together. Well, I didn't. There was no "back together" necessary. No stitching involved. Our relationship to food does not exist in some separate realm from our relationship to spirit, nor does our society's style of governance function in some kind of suspended plane from our value system or from our manners of resource use. But I have to forego the intuitive interconnections of things to cater to the interests of the disciplinary system of Academia. I truly do not understand why students in traditional colleges are not all trained to be fiercely interdisciplinary scholars (to the extent that we wouldn't even have the desire or ability to make sense of the concept of interdisciplinarity). It's really rage-inducing how microscopically-focused we've allowed ourselves to become. Alas, as much as I roil at this state of affairs, I too have fallen prey to the ever-increasing-fragmentation syndrome. Gah.

I could ramble my disgruntled thesis reactions for some time. But the important thing is that I get to writing again. Building on what I've learned about how to keep up a routine (with blogging, at least!), I will devote my main blogging energies to writing thesis content, great and small, and posting it here throughout August. I will have to reconcile myself to the fact that, if I want certain essays (explorations on a theme or question) to be as short as a book page, only a couple paragraphs long, then short writing (only a paragraph or two) will have to become ordinary (and if so, all the better, for this will deflate the pressure of writing; if I write constantly, in little portions, I will rarely have to confront the behemoth of a massive assignment). I will write other posts to diversify the offerings this month on the blog (though the thesis itself covers quite a gamut -- ecovillages, neo-tribalism, permaculture, animism, social theory, and on and on), just in case my draft work gets too caught up in one subject (Oh so very unlikely! C'mon, are we even talking about me anymore? Sheesh!). In the off chance, then. The highly unlikely off chance.

What is very obvious to me, and amazing, too, looking back on my years, my work, my interactions, is how much I've failed to chart any sort of progression. I just teeter all over the place, dabbling in new favorite subjects, connecting new puzzle pieces to the more and more unusual whole, starting and stopping new endeavors, never quite catching on to the how, the mechanics of the mystery surrounding how other people ever manage to be organized, disciplined, productive, and overall on top of things. In this context, my intentions for sharing my thesis check-ins, posting thesis drafts (or essay seeds), and adding content regularly to the blog (especially as I make the transition back into semester insanity) are all ways in which I am trying to get the hang of consistency, the most elusive but also the most essential of my summer goals.

Off to write out a loose posting schedule! Happy first night of August!

Keep reading: Thesis Check-In #1...

If There's No Such Thing As Away...

If there's no such thing as away, how come that's where all the blame goes? (Non-E-prime statements, obviously. In fact, the rest of the post doesn't follow E-prime strictures, either, not until I have time to edit out the verbs, "that is.")

I want to share a quote I uncovered in Janine Benyus's marvelous book, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired By Nature (I mistyped the subtitle--well, typed in a subtitle of a different book--"Remaking the Way We Make Things," which actually corresponds to another delightful, world-changing book, William McDonough and Michael Braungart's Cradle to Cradle). I'd started hearing myself say repeatedly to myself and others how this book was becoming steadily obsolete, twelve years since initial publication now, but really, the message of this book hasn't reached a wide-enough audience. Sure, the science might have progressed...

(Start parenthetical rant:) Solar cells are now something like 43% efficient, but she quotes, in an epigraph to a chapter, a news release dating from 1994!, that states, and I'm including the whole thing, too, because it's an adorable quote, as well, though not quite the original focus of my post:

"'Pond scum' may be a synonym for 'primitive,' but the tiny organisms that compose it easily beat the human state of the art when it comes to capturing energy from the sun. Some purple bacteria answering to that unflattering description use light energy with almost 95% efficiency--more than four times that of the best man-made solar cells."

On one level, this says a lot about the inaccuracies and false assumptions underlying the capacities of "primitive," a word that traces its etymology to the un-stigmatized concept of beginnings, one-ness, originations...prime, primal, first. However, it also reminds us that the scientific and inventive processes of agricultural-industrial civilization are just that -- innovative. We may have detached ourselves from many useful instincts, but civilization is not a cut-and-dried failure to discard immediately, without looking back, as some, such as primitivist author Derrick Jensen, encourage, and at all haste, at that. (Hmm...I have a lot to say about his Premises to his most recent work, Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization; Vol.2: Resistance, which complete work I have not yet had a chance to read, only this year having gotten around to A Language Older Than Words, a strange, sometimes loony, sometimes beautiful, powerful, poetic, ruminative work. As such, I think I might just discuss my qualms with those premises tomorrow.) Our culture has some awfully amazing accomplishments to its credit, and it continues to achieve them, as in more and more highly-efficient solar cells with better and better low-cost production. Though, of course, we should stop a second, as with any thought process in our consumerism-run-amok society, and ponder, "Do we really want to figure out how to make things better (Well, yes, the confluence of dismal planetary situations needs amelioration and remediation, but for our purposes here, I meant 'better things'), or would we end up better off if we learned once more how to require less?"

Requiring less has really bugged me a lot lately. Everything seems tied up in ways to get us to want more, and I feel this very acutely, half-trapped in these processes I do not wish to condone, not consciously, at least, as with any condonation. (With condone defined as "giv[ing ] tacit approval to" and tacit defined as "understood without being openly expressed; implied," using dictionary.com/Random House Dictionary. No, no, not doubting the intelligence of my readers, just getting a refresher myself. A long time now has passed since I had to worry about my words so carefully, to alleviate, by my worrying, such looming nightmares--not really--as the SAT. The crucial lesson of humility reminds us that it never hurts to learn the same lesson twice, multiple times, even. How's this for an exercise in meditation, the perception of relative urgencies: Try feigning ignorance next time your boss tells you how to do a routine task you've executed competently for what seems like forever. Perhaps she or he will offer insight or nuance to the task. Forgive this person, this other being, for doubting you. As a result, perhaps you'll find you've expanded your repertoire, if not in the nuance of the skill, at least in the limits of your patience. And godspeed!) My thinking about this has a lot to do with my recent reading of a small but feisty young-adult novel a friend passed on to me last month. Titled The Gospel According to Larry, this story involves a young man whose alter-ego goes haywire, the culture(s) surrounding his alter-ego, actually. Nevertheless, he stays true to the core tenets of his voluntarily simplistic lifestyle. He owns a mere seventy-five possessions! If he acquires something new, he either has to pass it along or send another of his belongings on its way. If he feels tempted to purchase a new item, he has to grapple long and hard with how much the item is really worth cluttering up his life just that bit more. I've felt incredibly jaded the last couple years. Something about this book, combined with this summer of productivity and other changes to my life this year, compels me to make more of an effort to simplify my life, perhaps even down to this drastic measure. Why not? (End rant; back to the initial point...)

(A refresher: I had started saying, "Sure, the science might have/has progressed...")

...but the idea of mimicking the planet's ancient processes, rather than applying our own hubris to the design of processes and materials, still has quite the following to amass. Onwards! Yeah...anyway, the quote:

"Though environmental policy makers have focused on the growing glut of garbage and pollution, most of the environmental damage is done before materials ever reach the consumer. Just four primary materials industries--paper, plastics, chemicals, and metals--account for 71 percent of the toxic emissions from manufacturing in the United States, according to the researchers. Five materials--paper, steel, aluminum, plastics, and container glass--account for 31 percent of U.S. manufacturing energy use."

-John E. Young and Aaron Sachs, authors of The Next Efficiency Revolution: Creating a Sustainable Materials Economy (Heh - I typed, "Sustainable Energy Revolution" -- Oh, propaganda, how you get to poor, tired souls!)

Initiatives to clean up our highways and parks, to curb the persistence of litter, have their place, but this gives us a bit of a jolt. Where best to focus our energies? We have limited lifespans, and the doomsayers predict we have very little time to solve pressing problems that could make living in the world we want to live in impossible. How will we spend our time? What to prioritize? (I also wish to discuss this topic of prioritization in an upcoming post.)

Many exhibits, photographs, books, poems, edicts, and other creative endeavors have derived from the very important concept, "There's no such thing as away." How important for us, in said overly consumptive society, to acknowledge how "away" only equates to "trash bags in trash cans that get dumped into larger garbage bins or dumpsters in garbage trucks that go to refugee camps for all the exiled trash bags, to commune with one another, die their slow deaths in the company of their trash bag companions, decompose together, layered over with the filler of more bags, soil, more bags, soil, then crushed, then filled in with more soil, and eventually something growing on that soil" -- Uy, how depressing landfill culture can feel!

But we can hardly consider our understanding, a raised consciousness (ah, the legacy of the sixties), enough. To reduce our feasible actions to the conscientiousness involved in extracting waste from our homes is quite the sad state of affairs, isn't it? And all that effort in contemplating purchasing a new item (the "Is it really worth it?" test)! It's much more difficult to stop our habituated selves from purchasing frivolous objects, with obscene amounts of packaging waste that doesn't often lend itself that well to any creative use or re-use, than it is to not have the objects available to purchase in the first place.

Streamlining. It can happen through legislation, but that's an intricate, unwieldy process. Who wants to waste the time, when one's intellectual capacities could go toward some other, more fulfilling use? It can also happen through materials design. Designers use intelligent design (Yes, ha ha. Good, good. It's one of my favorite things about the design professions, how much I get to use the words, "intelligent design," in an ironic way!), and suddenly, a billion worries extinguish in a single conscientious, carefully considered plan. And round and round we spin about this "best use of our efforts" challenge. What does the best use of your not-infinite life span look like?

Keep reading: If There's No Such Thing As Away......

Not Blogging Fast Enough!

I've got the lyrics from "Reptilia," a song by The Strokes, racing through my thoughts - "You're not driving fast enough!". Apparently, I have not managed to keep going fast enough, only the verb sounds more like "blogging."

A digression on E' ...Yes, that last sentence sounded a bit more awkward than it needed to, but I write under the heavy-handed, forbidding auspices of E-prime, which makes most writing feel more difficult than it otherwise should, what with all our reliance on the "to be" verbs. (I even felt uncomfortable writing, "over-reliant as we've become on the 'to be' verbs," since many of the 'be-(something)' verbs tend to come from corruptions and abbreviations of phrasings involving 'to be' conjugations. 'Become' seems to have derived from 'come to be' so I try to avoid it as I do the 'to be's.' I don't worry about it quite as much, but these verbs, seemingly derived from the 'be's,' do make me feel queasy!)

I keep meaning to get back up to speed, crafting at least one post a day, but I've struggled with form and structure. Also, this approach didn't keep me to the "[take] one day at a time" standard (the ideas of the A.A. organizations have a lot to teach all of us, even though many of us don't travel in its circles--its 12-step programs and other spiritual advice can heal many of us traumatized by the effects of all sorts of things, including, but certainly not limited to, alcohol, in our wearying milieu). So I will start posting more often, and creatively, about a whole mish-mash of ideas at first, until I come up with better ways to care and tend for this blog. I will keep you posted on that process itself, as well as much more. My apologies, then, if anything seems too distended and disconnected for a while yet. I feel gleeful to have the ability to share with a small but precious audience that can derive meaning from whatever plaguing thoughts with which I preoccupy myself, and the more I share, the more I'll find a coherent and cohesive way to convey those ideas. Until tomorrow!

Keep reading: Not Blogging Fast Enough!...

Turning Twenty, Turning Pages

Two weeks ago I turned twenty. I wrote about it a some days before the event, and my writing then is still indicative of the feeling of urgency I have about it:

I’m turning old, as in twenty, soon. For the last four and a half years of my life, somewhere between one fifth and one quarter of my life, my days have been, in a way, side-swept/cheapened by a peculiar phenomenon called, I suppose, not getting over myself, not accepting incontrovertible forks in the road. It has got to stop. I cannot live any more of my life in that way. If nothing else, apparently I must make some kind of way for myself in the world, must have an outlook that builds me up as I go rather than undermining me at critical moments or multi-dimensionally.

After all, I have spent my adolescence fearing that I would be lonely forever. As it turns out, this is an unlikely prospect. I have dated three rather interesting and mostly pleasant guys (when dating them, at least) in the last five years, nevermind that two were related. I have no idea where I go from there, where the threads of various relationships will take me, but at least I've learned a lesson in the extremism of self-pity.

I want the next, mirroring twenty years of my life to look entirely distinct from the last, tragic set. It has taken a rather protracted amount of time to make that observation, but it really has been tragic, and it is not surprising I have suffered much melancholy as a result in that time (Ahem. Editor's note: This pronouncement is obviously pre-birthday biased in favor of emphasizing the negative). Many unhappy circumstances have shaped my life up 'til now; I have made a great many mistakes/social blunders, stepped on people’s toes, insulted many, lived my life in somewhat socially unacceptable ways…and I cannot forgive myself.

I have bitten my nails to the brink of extinction; I haven't done as well in academic situations as I might have wished; and as I said, I have made many choices differently than many people expected me to make them, the social unacceptability of which, of many of these behaviors/actions, constantly calls into question my justification for doing so.

I have challenged my worldview many times, feared and tried to avoid solidifying my views by the time I maneuvered out of my teens, but instead I do have some solid views, including some solid views on perpetually questioning those views, a quirk that might at least, for some time yet, help to carry a younger person's lack of stubbornness with me for several more years, at advantage to me against my less open-minded peers. I’ve had some strange, half-fortuitous, spectacular, entertaining, though mostly unusual, moments in my life, but the cumulative effect is utterly unfulfilling. And that overall tenor to my life is precisely what I wish to break with for the next twenty years.

So what exactly do I want to happen in those two decades? I want to return to Brasil, to work and live there. I want to have children and raise them unfailingly continuum. I want to travel again. I want to publish different kinds of works (as in different genres, for different audiences). I want to provide for other people the kind of hope, support, care, attention, love, assurance that I felt resentment for not having in mine, and why not? How great is it if I can create that which doesn’t exist, if I can take what dissatisfies me and do something with it to enhance the lives of others, making mine better in the process, especially in the satisfaction of knowing that some of my behavior helped to steer others away from the paths I’ve been down in the urban landscape of melancholy?!

I want to complete a triathlon. I want to be happy for the most part, counter to the emptiness (though not really sadness) of the last twenty. I want to defend my views/statements well, solidly. I want to love. I want to finally be able to cook delicious meals. I want to write something that I can be proud of. I want to stay on top of things. I want to be successful, productive, but not because I am in search of success. I want to design nurturing, restorative, life-changing landscapes. I want to be a role model, mentor, important person in people’s lives. I want to create communities and ecovillages. I want to bring people together. I want to heal places like Omaha. I want to forgive my family for their failings and then avoid them and their deleterious powers in my life. I want to feel at peace in my own skin, in my own world, with my own decisions, with how things turn out. I want to live fully, simply, joyously.

I have edited and changed some of that writing, but the bulk of it still defines how I feel and what I am striving for or towards. I still feel the same. The last twenty years were mostly not up to me but rather up to my family, which experiences for a large chunk of that time I resented for that very reason. But now it is clear, the next twenty are certainly up to me.

I don't have to go to school if I don't find it valuable or worthwhile. I don't have to move across continents constantly if it seems to me a peculiarly wasteful habit. I don't have to adopt my parents' misanthropic view of their neighbors, their acquaintances, their peers. I don't have to visit random places sporadically, erratically. I can build genuine, lasting connections with people and places. I can break a cycle of familial gloom and dysfunction because I can harness a knowledge unavailable to my mother and her mother, or my father's mother and father, because I can use an inner sensitivity my parents and their progenitors seem to lack. I can create something affirming, beautiful, vibrant, something they are not capable of, something that no mellifluous tinkerings and breathy pipings could--except, of course, if used in ways for good, for something beyond individualistic projects, avenues that they would never think to use. I sound so pessimistic and flippant, and of course there have been pleasant moments with my family, but the recurring attitudes and indications of their beliefs and priorities have seared into my memory. I think of all my mother's scowls, my father's jarring tones, my grandmothers' insensitive words, my aunt's superficial goals, and I see that this need to break off and protect myself from their vapid negativity was decided long ago. It's kind of like getting stuck with the wrong family for your entire life so far. And though I've been jealous of other people's family bonds in recent years, especially their ability to deal with the people who life brought together into socially-recognized families, I have found my surrogates and, more importantly even than having my own semblance of such a socially-recognized family, will create my own tribal family over time. I simply can't give up, which I'm liable to do off and on in the somewhat lonely interim.

The "I'm not getting any younger" mentality is really getting to me. I'm filled with a kind of power surge to get everything done now. Why not? To read voraciously, an art I've never mastered--my readings always slow, pained, and meticulous, and therefore intermittent, infrequently sustained; to write intensely, constantly, spilling my ideas out of my cluttered head; to create what I want to see in the world not forty years from now but at this very moment...I didn't expect turning twenty to be much more than a lamentable aging milestone. Yet here I am, uncovering an energetic potential for manifesting goodness and hospitality that wasn't accessible to me before. I just don't know how long it will last until I crumble into a paralysis of indecision all over again. I mean, I expect that from myself, to move cyclically through my tumultuous emotions. My only hope, then, is that the energetic periods sustain themselves longer and occur more frequently than the fretting, immobile ones.

So...how did I actually spend my birthday, you ask? Well, the day before my birthday, a Sunday, my boyfriend took me to a restaurant serving Portuguese/Brasilian cuisine. The decor of the place was exquisite! There were brilliant (as in brilla - Spanish; brilhante - Portuguese) murals on the walls, depicting social dances, fishermen at sea, couples at dinner. They were painted in very earthy hues, but the dancers had bright clothing in reds and whites. Just a lovely surrounding to situate myself for a birthday dinner. I had sardines (which I tried to share with Peter, but he's a picky eater!), caldo verde, beans and rice, and mariscada (Peter took a hilarious snapshot of me on his iPhone, with me wearing a silly and childish plastic bib with a goofy lobster printed on it). I've tried being a vegetarian before, but I struggle with finding a way to balance my anthropological interest in meat and fish and an ethical position about animal rights and shrunken ecological footprints (because apparently the greatest environmental actions we can take in our society are renouncing cars and meat, a view I'm starting to find more than a little problematic!). What I can say for myself is that Peter and I looked up on the iPhone Safari the list of good, bad, and so-so fish to eat/not to eat. Check it out here. Apparently, the Monterey Bay Aquarium keeps more detailed guides by region. Also, if you're ever in the disgustingly well-to-do Westchester County, definitely make sure to dine at Aquario.

I spent much of the week of my birthday working on a brand-new Bookstore Blog for my favoritest bookstore ever, aside from fixing up the bookstore's website pages (not updating time-specific information, however, since I'm so far away and no longer involved in the daily life of the store; though perhaps I should have made some long-overdue information changes...but I barely had enough time that week, as it was!). My favorite part, of course, being the visually rich Holy Hardware page. Buying local (even if local is a long-distance loyalty) definitely adds up. Buying from Amazon, not so much. I'm really excited to have some more time to add other fabulous features to the website, such as a mini-catalogue of our incredible selection of meaningful children's books, a record of our resources for those interested in simple living, as well as adding even more photos and product information to the site. The thing is, I'd have to go home for that (to take photos, to come up-to-date with changes at the store and with new titles and items, to hang out in one of my favorite spaces in the world, with some of my favorite people and dog, etc.), and oh, how much I would like to do so! I just don't know when that will be possible. And I crumble in jealousy for those well-off folks who don't even have to think twice about arranging flights home, for vacation, etc.. Maybe I'm beyond hope, maybe I actually can't change for the better?

I'll try to keep up my spirits, my momentum and live within the exhilaration of having a hand in the crafting of the next twenty years of my life. If I'm lucky, I won't even recognize my current self, my current sour attitudes and sulking moods, my habitual languor and mediocracy, when I get there. I hope this new-found energy overtakes that prevalent sluggishness and that unnecessary pity-partying. And so a toast: To luck and momentum!

Keep reading: Turning Twenty, Turning Pages...