Stuff

We watched The Story of Stuff in my Life Management class today. If you haven't watched it yet, I encourage you to click the link and check it out. It's about 20 minutes long, but very fast paced and really interesting. It discusses how our materialistic world got started and how it's affecting our Earth.

This got me thinking. I have geek lust for the new Kindle 2. It's an electronic device that's about the size of a piece of paper, and the thickness of a pencil. It's a method of reading ebooks, newspapers, newsfeeds, etc. But my question is, which is worse for our environment, paper books, or electronic devices like the Kindle? On one hand, trees have to be chopped down to make the paper for old school, printed books. On the other, how many resources are used to make disposable plastic and silicone-based electronic devices?

Something that really stressed me out about this video is that 99% of the things we buy are thrown away within 6 months, because of planned and perceived obsolescence.

Just something to think about today.

Change?

Much to my cousin's dismay, I've never been one for politics. While it's hard to miss the headlines that roll across my Reader every morning, I never really read the articles. I find it all really fake. After the past two years of the campaign, I'm really sick of watching commercials that sound like something out of the Burn Book from Mean Girls. Last night, the only election coverage I watched was Indecision '08 with John Stewart and Steven Colbert. And even then, I fell asleep and missed half the show. I woke up just in time for Obama to be crowned. I went to bed in the middle of McCain's pity party speech.

All that said, I find myself contemplating the election this morning. All over the place, people are terrified or ecstatic. On my Reader and the blogs, on Twitter and Facebook, statuses have been rolling across the feeds this morning. I saw one that said "This is the first time I've ever been proud to be an American." Someone else said that they opened their window this morning and could feel the change.

I'll tell you what change you feel. The leaves are changing colors. They are falling off the trees. The temperature is getting cooler. The only change you feel this morning is the season changing. On my way to class this morning, students were still hurrying to class. Traffic still moved too fast on Riverside. My husband still sat on the couch searching Careerbuilder for a job. Drains still needed cleaned out, my cat is still insane.

It's like people thought that things were going to change over night. That because the election was last night, everything is different this morning. But Bush is still President. For the next 2 months. And even when Obama is inaugurated, change is not going to happen overnight. It takes months, sometimes years, for laws and policies to change. Problems appear overnight. Solutions do not.

I have no idea whether Obama will be bad or good for this country. I have no way of really knowing if McCain would have been better or worse. Only God really knows what the future holds for us. That said, we have to wake up. Go back to work, school, life. Keep making your own way. I can guarantee no politician, Democrat or Republican, not even Libertarian, is going to save you. Business is still going to go through its cycles. There will be good times, there will be hard times. The only thing we can do is our absolute best. We have to keep fighting, no matter what happens. Change doesn't happen over night. We have to work hard for it.

Advertising on Municipal Vehicles

I'm not sure how I feel about this. It's great that our mayor is trying to find ways to help with government cash flow. However, how intimidating are our cop cars going to look like with a Tampax ad on the side?

You went to Borders? OMG I can't believe that!

To me, this law just pushes things way too far. Even the LIBRARY carries sexually explicit books (hello, bodice rippers!). What's next, banning children from entering a library? With books like Sacred Sex, even Christian bookstores could be labeled as Adult Bookstores. Stupid.

Polar Bears as Terrorists?

We all know the War on Terror is, at least in part, a War for Oil. Apparently, Bush now considers polar bears terrorists. How DARE they hinder our oil harvesting in order to protect their shrinking habitat!

What you would find if you looked up "Irony" in the dictionary

Does this strike anyone else as hilarious? I'm sure that was the point, Ellen being the prankster that she is. Ellen and her long time girlfriend are getting married, that's old news as of last week. But, they have decided to get married at the Bush ranch. Pretty sure that last time I checked, George W. was dead against gay marriage. Not to mention the hilarious dirty jokes that come to mind at the thought of this.

Aninimal Human Hybird...

Who really thinks this is a good idea? Note that they say that a human embryo will be injected into an animal egg in which ALMOST all genetic material will be removed.

Dick Cheney Assumes the Presidential Powers as Bush undergoes Colonoscopy

President George W. Bush transferred the powers of the presidency to Vice President Dick Cheney on Saturday just before being sedated for a routine screening to detect colon cancer.

With a signed letter to the leaders of the House and Senate, Bush temporarily transferred his authority at 7:16 a.m. (1116 GMT) to Cheney, who is at his home on the Chesapeake Bay in St. Michaels, Maryland, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) east of Washington.

"The vice president is now serving as acting president," White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said.

He said the temporary transfer of power will end when Bush transmits a second letter to the congressional leaders advising that he is resuming the powers of the presidency immediately.

Bush relinquished his authority by implementing Section 3 of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution. The amendment — approved in 1967 four years after President Kennedy was assassinated — has been used only twice before.

The first time was in July 1985 when President Ronald Reagan underwent surgery and turned over power to his vice president, Bush's father. The other time was when Bush relinquished his presidential powers to Cheney for more than two hours during a colon cancer scan on June 29, 2002.

Dr. Richard Tubb, the president's doctor, was supervising Bush's colonoscopy, which was being done at the Camp David presidential retreat. The colonoscopy was being performed by a team from the National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda, Maryland.

"Although no polyps were noted in the exam in 2002, age and history would suggest that there's a reasonable chance that polyps will be noted this time," White House press secretary Tony Snow said Friday. "If so, they'll be removed and evaluated microscopically."

Two polyps were discovered during similar examinations in 1998 and 1999, while Bush was governor of Texas. That made the 61-year-old president a prime candidate for regular examinations.

Snow, himself a cancer sufferer, said results would be available after 48 hours to 72 hours, if not sooner.

Snow had his colon removed in 2005 and underwent six months of chemotherapy after being diagnosed with colon cancer. On March 26, he underwent surgery to remove a growth in his abdominal area, and doctors determined that cancer had metastasized, or spread, to the liver.

For the general population, a colonoscopy to screen for colon cancer is recommended every 10 years. But for people at higher risk, or if a colonoscopy detects precancerous polyps, follow-up colonoscopies often are scheduled in three- to five-year intervals.

Associated Press. "Dick Cheney Assumes Presidential Powers as Bush Undergoes Colonoscopy." 21 July 2007. FOXNews.com. 21 July 2007. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,290263,00.html

"If glory can be killed, we are lost."

"Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then--the glory--so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.
"I don't know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economies, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused.
"At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?
"Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.
"And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repression, forced direction, and the stunning hammerblows of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken.
"And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost."

Steinbeck, John. East of Eden. New York: Penguin Books, 1952.

"Poetry is Dangerous" by Kazim Ali

On April 19, after a day of teaching classes at Shippensburg University, I went out to my car and grabbed a box of old poetry manuscripts from the front seat of my little white Beetle and carried it across the street and put it next to the trashcan outside Wright Hall. The poems were from poetry contests I had been judging and the box was heavy. I had previously left my recycling boxes there and they were always picked up and taken away by the trash department.

A young man from ROTC was watching me as I got into my car and drove away. I thought he was looking at my car which has black flower decals and sometimes inspires strange looks. I later discovered that I, in my dark skin, am sometimes not even a person to the people who look at me. Instead, in spite of my peacefulness, my committed opposition to all aggression and war, I am a threat by my very existence, a threat just living in the world as a Muslim body.

Upon my departure, he called the local police department and told them a man of Middle Eastern descent driving a heavily decaled white Beetle with out of state plates and no campus parking sticker had just placed a box next to the trash can. My car has New York plates, but he got the rest of it wrong. I have two stickers on my car. One is my highly visible faculty parking sticker and the other, which I just don't have the heart to take off these days, says "Kerry/Edwards: For a Stronger America."

Because of my recycling the bomb squad came, the state police came. Because of my recycling buildings were evacuated, classes were canceled, campus was closed. No. Not because of my recycling. Because of my dark body. No. Not because of my dark body. Because of his fear. Because of the way he saw me. Because of the culture of fear, mistrust, hatred, and suspicion that is carefully cultivated in the media, by the government, by people who claim to want to keep us safe.

These are the days of orange alert, school lock-downs, and endless war. We are preparing for it, training for it, looking for it, and so of course, in the most innocuous of places--a professor wanting to hurry home, hefting his box of discarded poetry--we find it.

That man in the parking lot didn't even see me. He saw my darkness. He saw my Middle Eastern descent. Ironic because though my grandfathers came from Egypt, I am Indian, a South Asian, and could never be mistaken for a Middle Eastern man by anyone who'd ever met one.

One of my colleagues was in the gathering crowd, trying to figure out what had happened. She heard my description--a Middle Eastern man driving a white beetle with out of state plates--and knew immediately they were talking about me and realized that the box must have been manuscripts I was discarding. She approached them and told them I was a professor on the faculty there. Immediately the campus police officer said, "What country is he from?"

"What country is he from?!" she yelled, indignant.

"Ma'am, you are associated with the suspect. You need to step away and lower your voice," he told her.

At some length several of my faculty colleagues were able to get through to the police and get me on a cell phone where I explained to the university president and then to the state police that the box contained old poetry manuscripts that needed to be recycled. The police officer told me that in the current climate I needed to be more careful about how I behaved. "When I recycle?" I asked.

The university president appreciated my distress about the situation but denied that the call had anything to do with my race or ethnic background. The spokesperson of the university called it an "honest mistake," not referring to the young man from ROTC giving in to his worst instincts and calling the police but referring to me who made the mistake of being dark-skinned and putting my recycling next to the trashcan.

The university's bizarrely minimal statement lets everyone know that the "suspicious package" beside the trashcan ended up being, indeed, trash. It goes on to say, "We appreciate your cooperation during the incident and remind everyone that safety is a joint effort by all members of the campus community."

What does that community mean to me, a person who has to walk by the ROTC offices every day on my way to my own office just down the hall--who was watched, noted, and reported, all in a days work? Today we gave in willingly and whole-heartedly to a culture of fear and blaming and profiling. It is deemed perfectly appropriate behavior to spy on one another and police one another and report on one another. Such behaviors exist most strongly in closed and undemocratic and fascist societies.

The university report does not mention the root cause of the alarm. That package became "suspicious" because of who was holding it, who put it down, who drove away. Me.

It was poetry, I kept insisting to the state policeman who was questioning me on the phone. It was poetry I was putting out to be recycled.

My body exists politically in a way I can not prevent. For a moment today, without even knowing it, driving away from campus in my little beetle, exhausted after a day of teaching, listening to Justin Timberlake on the radio, I ceased to be a person when a man I had never met looked straight through me and saw the violence in his own heart.

Ali, Kazim. "Poetry is Dangerous." 2006. http://www.kazimali.com/

From "If Men Could Menstruate" by Gloria Steinem

"What would happen, for instance, if suddenly, magically, men could menstruate and women could not?
The answer is clear--menstruation would become an enviable, boast-worthy, masculine event:
Men would brag about how long and how much.
Boys would mark the onset of menses, that longed-for proof of manhood, with relgious ritual and stag parties.
Congress would fund a National Institute of Dysmenorrhea to help stamp out monthly discomforts.
Sanitary supplies would be federally funded and free. (Of course, some men would still pay for the prestige of commercial brands such as John Wayne Tampons, Muhammad Ali's Rope-a-dope Pads, Joe Namath Jocks Shields--'For Those Light Bachelor Days,' and Robert 'Baretta' Blake Maxi-Pads.)
Military men, right-wing politicians, and religious fundamentalists would cite menstruation ('men-struation') as proof that only men could serve in the Army ('you have to give blood to take blood'), occupy political office ('can women be aggressive without that steadfast cycle governed by the planet Mars?'), be priests and ministers ('how could a woman give her blood for our sins?'), or rabbis ('without the monthly loss of impurities, women remain unclean').
Male radicals, left-wing politicians, and mystics, however would insist that women are equal, just different; and that any woman could enter their ranks if only she were willing to self0inflict a major wound every month ('you must give blood for the revolution'), recognize the preeminence of menstrual issues, or subordinate her selfness to all men in their Cycle of Enlightenment.
Street guys would brag ('I'm a three-pad man') or answer praise from a buddy (Man, you lookin' good!') by giving fives and saying, 'Yeah, man, I'm on the rag!'
TV shows would treat the subject at length. ('Happy Days': Richie and Potsie try to convince Fonzie that he is still 'The Fonz,' though he has missed two periods in a row.) So would newspapers. (SHARK SCARE THRETENS MENSTRUATING MEN. JUDGE CITES MONTHLY STRESS IN PARDOINING RAPIST.) And movies. (Newman and Redford in 'Blood Brothers'!)
Men would convince women that intercourse was more pleasurable at 'that time of the month.' Lesbians would be said to fear blood and therefore lif itself--though probably only because they needed a good menstruating man.