Not Resolutions

Yesterday’s Lincoln Journal Star editorial listed out the paper’s priorities for its editorial board this year, including pushing for a southern bypass for Highway 2 and keeping an eye on the current debate over tax reform, among other things. It got me to thinking, as most things do.

I am not prone to making resolutions, either at the dawn of a new year or at any other time. I have mentioned before my lifelong pursuit of relative planlessness, my disinterest in formal goal setting, and my general philosophy of facing each day on its own merits. As with any pronouncement, such talk has to be taken with a grain of salt. I did go to grad school with a goal in mind. I have a 403b. I spend at least a part of every workday setting objectives for my classroom and planning how we will reach those objectives. I have indeed done many things in my life that require forethought and preparation. Such activities are unavoidable to all but the most sloth-like.

But formally preparing a plan of attack for life in general, resolving to do this or that, or determining how I will conduct myself over any given 365-day, five-year, or ten-year period is something I have never been terribly excited to do or interested in. However, listing a set of priorities for an editorial board sounds like a completely legit and useful thing to do. Maybe it is simply a function of getting older, but for some reason, the idea finally made a certain amount of qualified sense to me.

So, I imagined myself as the board of an organization. That organization is me, consisting, as I do, of 65% water, 20% protein, 12% fats, and less than 1.5% each of DNA, RNA, and other organic and inorganic compounds, and governed, ostensibly, by the two and half pounds that is my brain. I am not about to get into any sort of Cartesian philosophical discussion of how that brain which is me can govern me, or what “me” is anyway. As that old hippie, Arlo Guthrie, is prone to saying: “That’s not what I came to talk about.”

However, I did spend some time thinking about what I wanted to set as my priorities for the year. I have tried not to phrase these priorities like resolutions, but sometimes that might be unavoidable. Whether they can be regarded as resolutions or not, I will not be referring to them as such. The Journal Star chose five priorities, so I have followed their lead.

First, I want to focus on consciousness. I am going to attempt to prioritize my choices to allow me to practice my beliefs more directly. For instance, I am ecologically-minded, so our household recycles, reuses as much as is feasible, tries to make food choices that are local and sustainable, and we keep the thermostat programmed and set at the minimum for comfort (or maybe even below…according to some guests) during all seasons. There is huge room for improvement, however. Primarily, we can eat more organic food. This is an expensive choice, but it would not create a hardship, I don’t think. Second, I could get back on my bike more often. I have not used the bike as transportation in far too long. My commute to work makes riding impractical, but I could use the bike for shorter trips. Perhaps the biggest manifestation of this priority is to look into improving the efficiency of this ninety year-old house. The windows need to be replaced, the doors need to be better weather-stripped, and the south-facing roof would be a perfect spot for solar cells.  Here, of course, money is the issue.

Second, I want to prioritize time outdoors. In the past, I would be out at a park or some other natural area nearly every weekend, regardless of season, birding, walking, fishing. I get out maybe once a month, now. That is a question of time.  I just have to make it.

Third, I want to prioritize charity. I currently donate to three organizations and whatever cause the kids are raising funds for at school. I think I can manage to part with a few more dollars to help other organizations whose missions I believe in and whose priorities are legit. I have not settled on which organizations those are, but I would like to double the number of groups that I support.

Also, I want to prioritize my profession. In reality, I don’t think I need to make this a priority, in some respects, since it is already probably my number one priority, but there are a few opportunities I want to take advantage of this year. I will attend the AP Summer Institute this year, something I have been considering since I started teaching. I also want to get serious about National Board Certification. I have mentioned this before, and the amount of work it takes to get certified seems daunting, but I think it would be a worthwhile experience. I don’t believe this is something I will achieve this year, but I do want to get the ball rolling in the next twelve months.

Finally, I want to prioritize writing. Thus far, I have done okay at keeping up with the blog posts. It has been only four weeks, so I have done nothing to really instill me with overwhelming confidence, but the fact that I am writing this now means that I am writing and not not writing. So, you know, I have got that going for me.

And, there it is: my five priorities for the year. I am going to go out on a limb here and say that I will be successful at developing some of these priorities and unsuccessful at developing others. I am okay with that. I hope that I remember to check back in with the board to see how I am doing at maintaining my focus this year, but even that is not guaranteed. One thing I do know: these are not resolutions, no matter how much they may sound like it.

Have you any priorities this year? I would be interested to hear where you are considering focusing your own energy. And, of course, I wish you luck!

What Kind of Idiots Are We?

The weather has finally broken here in the Great American Desert. It is far too early, but after a spell of frigidness, hearing the birds chirping and watching the snow melt away and feeling the sun actually warm on your back puts one in a mind of Spring. That’s where my mind was this weekend, throwing the ball to Parker in the back yard.  It was a joy to feel like the outdoors wasn’t trying to kill me for a change, but I am certain that some more bone chilling is on the way some time before April.

No, the outdoors isn’t trying to kill us, at least not anymore than it ever has been since mankind first hopped down out of the trees. The planet doesn’t necessarily have it in for us—it has it in for every living thing. Life is harsh. Weather, of course, is just the half of it. The whole circle of life or the whole system, if you will, is fraught with peril.  Predators search for prey, parasites look for hosts, Justin Beiber looks for neighbor’s houses to egg—it is a mad and dangerous world, left to its own devices.

However, having crawled down out of the trees, mankind has sought to alter the environment as we have seen fit.  And there is little seriously denying that those alterations have made existence that much more difficult for everything on this planet, be it a beast of the soil, a bird of the air, or a fish of the desperate sea (if I may paraphrase Jolie Holland).

Global warming notwithstanding, it is no secret that industrial, agricultural, and social choices made by humans have had drastic and usually detrimental effects on the natural systems and rhythms of the planet. From the melt down of nuclear plants to the discharge of waste into waterways, from the belching of the earliest coal plants to the damming and diversion of rivers, the things that have been done on earth have clearly made it a different place. More often than not, that “different” is a negative. Sure, somebody makes money somewhere along the line, but (and, yes, I am oversimplifying) that is more often than not the only indisputable positive to be gained from mining, deforesting, harvesting, terraforming, building, flooding, carving, etc.—and the benefit of that positive is debatable in itself from a Marxist perspective (which is not the perspective I am taking, today).

It would take an encyclopedia to catalogue the destruction of our ecosystems, but, on the optimistic side, many people are working to reverse much of the damage that has been wrought.  Recently, however, a couple of incidents have reminded me that too many powerful people have no real interest in ensuring the long term health of our surroundings. First, I read a story about tailing ponds in Canada, a byproduct of the tar sands oil mining that is going on up there. Granted, the incident that I was reading about occurred four years ago, but that doesn’t really matter. The point of the story, to me, is that the tailing ponds are so toxic that migratory birds that land in them die. So, to keep the birds from landing in the ponds, the oil companies have installed ingenious devices that use radar to detect the incoming birds. When a flock of birds is detected, the devices activate a moving model of a peregrine falcon, which is meant to scare away the birds. I will admit that this is a brilliant solution to the plan. Kudos to human/Canadian ingenuity. I just wonder if the thought ever crossed the mind of anybody trying to solve the problem that maybe the whole idea of having a bunch of toxic ponds anywhere was a good idea to begin with. I know, we need the oil…but, you know what? Maybe we don’t. I mean, when does the cost become too high?

The second item that got me going on this little jeremiad was the chemical leak that ruined the entire water supply of the city of Charlestown, WVA. If that is not a sign of impending environmental apocalypse, I don’t know what is. I don’t want to sound like a Chicken Little. I try to avoid that sort of overreaction as much as possible. However, some of the more infuriating revelations of this story is that a) the holding area where the chemicals that leaked were being stored had not been inspected by regulators for 23 years, b) Freedom Industries, the company that was storing the chemicals, knew the holding structures were faulty, and c) the government was unconcerned with the chemicals being stored because they weren’t deemed dangerous enough to monitor. I will leave the righteous indignation up to you.

We are good at holding people accountable, since it makes good press and good politics, so someone will be held responsible. Someone will be fined. Someone will lose a job. Some law will be changed (or at least debated). But that won’t change the fact that an immensely preventable spill of 7500 gallons of a “non-toxic” chemical made the water supply of an entire city non-potable. I don’t want anyone to think I am about to run off and join some Ellen Page-style environmentalist terrorist group. I just get rundown by so much of what people perpetrate on this planet in the name of money, or from just plain negligence.

The irony of both of these incidents is that we wrought the damage upon ourselves (and migratory birds (and fish (and aquatic plant life (and probably insects and amoebae and paramecia and who knows what all else)))). It is hard enough to hang on to life here on earth as it is. We have survived saber-tooth tigers, ice ages, earthquakes, meteors, tsunamis, diseases, poor posture, and the 70s. But I don’t know how much more we can take. We are slowly destroying the only home we have. What kind of idiots are we? 

Meat as Madeleine

Life is many things. Human life, anyway. It is miraculous, as is all life, of course—but a human’s life can be miraculous in ways that a meerkat’s or a sea worm’s probably can’t--primarily due to a meerkat or a sea worm being less self-aware than a human or less able to process the things that occur to and around it. A terrestrial life form other than a human cannot experience wonder. I don’t think a meerkat can experience wonder. Confusion, perhaps, but not wonder. This is a positive to being human, I submit.

On the other hand, there are things like melancholy. Melancholy, like wonder, is something that I imagine your various beastly herds do not experience. I might be wrong here. I know I have seen animals display things that look like sadness and sympathy, but I am not wholly convinced that that is what I am seeing. However, if they can experience sadness and sympathy, then I don’t imagine melancholy is much of a leap, and my whole idea falls apart. That is not a bad thing. If my whole idea falls apart, it is only because a new idea has replaced it. And what is better than a new idea? But, if I may, let’s accept that melancholy is a completely and singularly human feeling.

Melancholy, to the dichotomous mind, is probably a bad thing. Assuming that dichotomy is good/bad. If it’s color-based or number-based, I don’t know what category melancholy fits in. If I had to put it somewhere in those two possible dichotomies, I would put melancholy in the blue category and the three category (three being a completely arbitrary assignment on my part, fully recognizing that a dichotomy consists of two categories, which makes three a less-than-logical choice…ergo, arbitrary). However, there are many times when melancholy is a good thing. Or, at worst, it is precipitated by some association with a good thing.  After all, isn’t that the basis of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time?

This is all brought up by a particularly Proustian moment that I recently had. (I promise that this will not last for anywhere close to three-thousand pages, but I can’t promise that it will be any more entertaining or make any more sense than Proust.) I was making a meat sauce for our New Year’s Eve lasagna (a sort-of tradition). I started the sauce with a piece of pork, sautéed in some onions and garlic. This hunk o’ pig simmers along with the rest of the sauce for hours, just like the hunk of neck bone that my grandmother used to put in her sauce. After the sauce is cooked down (about three hours), the pork comes out, super-tender and super-flavorful.

Some cooks might shred that super-super meat and put it back in the sauce. Not me. My grandmother taught me that that is the most exquisite kitchen-counter meat-eating experience, to stand there and snack on the stew meat (sauce, soup, stew, whatever). So that is what I did. 

That first taste of pork immediately threw my synapses into a high-speed game of taste-and-go-seek. Like the whiff of your long-dead aunt’s perfume immediately puts you back in her presence, this taste of pork immediately shot my mind feed from live to video, and, for a split-second, I was in my grandmother’s EZ-bricked kitchen--with WITH (“The Music of Your Life” and the flagship station of the Baltimore Skipjack’s radio network) playing Nat “King” Cole--and tearing little pieces of steaming hot saucy pork off the bone with a woman I still miss almost every day, even after fifteen years. The memory was attended by the instantaneous melancholy that comes from any nostalgic recreation of genuinely good experience and the recollection of lost loved ones.

This is not remarkable, of course. It happens to everybody, every day, I suspect. This time of year, or the period just past, since the holiday season is just about over, probably jars all of us into both pleasant and unpleasant remembrances of things past. Usually, these feelings come and go so quickly, we might not even have the time to dwell on them. However, in this moment, I was lucky; I had time, as I stood alone in the kitchen to really allow myself the experience. I let the sad feelings wash over after the initial shot of joy.  But I realized, as I ruminated on the present meat and the past moment, that it was ultimately a happy moment. There was that one split second of a split second, that one half of a half of a heartbeat when I was really there, really back in that kitchen, twenty years ago. It was a pleasant visit. The sadness, the melancholy, comes from that realization that I have no control, really, over how (and/or when) I get back. I can think about things like the past and the people whom I miss who are no longer a part of my life at my own volition, but it is not the same. Only the unconscious parts of my brain have the real power to completely transport me back to wherever. I look forward to going back.