Things I Do

[greenstorm]

It occurred to me this morning that I'm currently jumping through a bunch of hoops in an attempt to end up in a different life, essentially, but these hoops don't prepare me to live that life particularly well. I'm learning to be fast, efficient, to rarely slow down, to be enormously productive, to keep on my own ass about getting things done, to schedule and fit things in. I always imagine myself wanting a life where I can slow down, do more with less, and pay close attention to the things around me.

If this isn't the way to get to that place, I should definitely sit down and think about whether I'm enjoying the journey. If not, why am I doing it? Having said that, I'm somewhat recovered from the week, I've got some exciting things planned in the next little while and also some downtime to help reestablish my reserves, the number of hours I spend at work will be dropping soon enough, and as I write this I am happy.

I'm not coherent (I'm in negotiations with a potential bottom for a significant scene today and pretty giddy about it) but I am happy.

I'm also very good at procrastinating. One of the benefits of having so many things to do is that there's always something to procrastinate about, but that you can procrastinate by doing one of the other things so something is always being accomplished. I avoided making phone calls by doing homework; I avoid rat cages by doing homework and vice versa; I avoid all that by livejournaling but it's a pretty finite thing so there we go.

I'm not sure if I've written about how my classes are falling out at all. My Monday class is somewhat noteworthy in being the core course of the program, Sustainable Resource Management, and so part of work the course does is to connect all the other program courses and draw lines between them. It's a systems course, and the scope is huge. Having said that, one of the things we're doing right now is a group presentation with 5 people, 15 powerpoint slides, and a few minutes to summarize what we think are the major global issues currently. Now, my group is composed of a bunch of very aware, knowledgeable, passionate people who love discussing this stuff and who do independent research of this kind for fun. We've already agreed to have a beer and movies night and cover some of the documentaries we haven't all seen. We've also agreed to figure out our own personal takes on what the major global issues are and bring them back for discussion next time we meet.

This is fun, challenging, and awesome. Brevity, hah!

So I was talking to kindelingboy and he said, "you mean environmental issues." I challenged him to name one big issue that wasn't an environmental one. Can you? One that doesn't have huge big straight lines leading to an environmental cause or effect?

Comments

[graydon.livejournal.com]

Weapons manufacture, Illiteracy, censorship, fundamentalism, income inequality, corruption, political representation or repression, disability rights, reproductive rights, slavery, genocide. Some of the deeper causes -- nationalism or colonialism in general, say -- themselves have partial environmental causes or effects, but you've not always got big straight lines; a lot of the groups involved would not spend time focusing on the environmental influences, either way.

(Hesitant to say "reproductive rights": I think, and I suspect you do also, that the environmental effects of reproduction are the Big Deal, but in much of NGO-land it is treated as solely consisting of the human-freedom / sexual-equality sub-component. The consensus seems to be that any concern for population-limitation is just differently-coded racism or eugenics. Never mind the fact that I think it's the rich and privileged -- folks like me -- that need to reproduce less. Mentioning that in public is enough to be completely excluded from political discourse.)

In any case, I agree that the important issues are all environmental :)