Not Waiting For New Year's For This One

As part of the overall self-improvement project, I'm going to start trying to leave no dirty dishes in the sink when I go to bed. I grew up in a house with a dishwasher, and when I moved out, I fell into a 'why do dishes if there isn't a full dishrack's worth?' habit that was really just an excuse to procrasinate.

This is so not a real post. The real one is coming later. It took me this long to settle on a new worthy topic.

I'll leave you with a song:

Have You Had the Talk?

Have *you* talked to your Significant Other about climate change?

I read this article yesterday, and it sent me down a well-worn but infrequently travelled mental path. I saw "The Day After Tomorrow" when it came out in 2004 - I was 15 - and it left a profound although latent mark on me. At that time, I got an impulse to learn to knit - didn't go very well, I never learned how to start a new row. The impulse settled down and I moved on.

But the mark remained. I had seen humanity's ignorance and apathy drive the climate to deadly extremes. Spoiler: the movie ends with a big question mark - with only the warmer areas of the planet still habitable, now flooded with homeless white people from the Global North, what would happen? (I believe that an old roleplay on TUL had a similar background premise.)

And I knew full well that of all the apocalyptic science fiction movie possibilities, the climate roaring down to destroy the world As We Know It is one of the few that might actually happen.
And as I've gotten older, I've heard mounting evidence that it's rapidly leaving the realm of fiction and rushing towards the realm of cold, hard, globally-warmed reality. The afore-linked article just gave more solid numbers to what I've known for years.

Among them: 16 years. 16 years, if we keep burning through hydrocarbons at our current rate of increase, before we will have set the stage for the planet to warm by 2 degrees Celcius: the "okay, fine, you win - the planet is too hot, we admit that global warming exists" number. According to that article, we're already only .2 degrees C away from most of Africa becoming uninhabitable.

Oh. Here's another one, about Greenland experiencing a one-per-every-150-years melting event.

So how old will I be in 16 years? I'm turning 23 soon, so that would make me 39. It's the year 2012 now, so 16 years would make it 2028. At 39, I hope to have been teaching elementary school for years, and have three or four kids, four cats, a dog, a ball python, a car that will need replacing soon, and a house with a garden and a few years already paid off the mortgage. I hope to be living somewhere green enough to keep me sane, yet close enough to other people that I'll have a job and won't have to drive an hour just to buy food.

If the price of gas is already climbing ten cents or more a year, and if it was already as hot as summer in early May this season, how realistic is this dream? The life that P and I have been planning out for years now?

I really don't know. It's not a happy thought, and as I read the article out loud I found myself just as happy to become distracted by another adorable kitten picture online, helping cut the seriousness of the message. I don't want it to be serious. I don't want to have to sit down and say, "Love, what are we going to do when there's no more gasoline except for rich people?" And there's no more tropical fruit at the grocery store because it's too expensive to ship. And nothing's made of plastic anymore because the oil is too valuable as fuel. Will cars be running on electricity and ethanol, or will the highways be deserted? Will we all be at war over the last few oilfields? Will the US annex Alberta so it doesn't have to pay for our thrice-damned tar sand? I wish I knew. I've read my history, and I know that humanity tends to happily wallow in the ruins of its former greatness rather than exert itself to maintain anything properly.

I even didn't want to finish this post, because to send it out into the aether is to admit it. To take a stand and say: I acknowledge that climate change is going to screw all my future plans. I acknowledge that planning ahead for a time when nothing is as it is now, when I can no longer conveniently hop on my laptop with a glass of grape juice, is more practical than paranoid. I admit that all our little energy-saving efforts smack of OCD rituals: if I turn off the monitor, if I install compact fluorescent lighting, if I walk to the store, I will stave off the apocalypse and acid rain will not kill my family... and these little rituals are not enough. They will not stave it off, and nothing you or I or we can do while still living an even slightly mainstream lifestyle will be enough to stave it off.

Either we all start putting up a shitload of windmills and force our societies to STOP BURNING OIL AND COAL (and other hydrocarbons - even burning wood wouldn't really be any better), or we get ready for things to change.

Warm places will become hot. This includes most of the Global North - that's us, folks.
Hot places will become uninhabitable. Those droughts in the Horn of Africa last year? Yeah.
Cool places will become more comfortable. I suspect that areas like Siberia, Canada's Northwest Territories, Alaska, and Scandinavia will become more popular (and populous) over time. Actually: populous, yes - when the hot places, full of billions of people, get hotter, they're not going to lay down and die (and I wouldn't wish them to). They're going to emigrate, they're going to flee, and eventually we're probably going to flee them and go farther north. That's if we haven't already fled the rising temperatures in our own homelands.

I recently wrote a piece in which a character looked back at his life from the age of 56. I was shocked, frightened even, to think through all the scenarios I had thrown him into over the years and weave them into one logical timeline: it's here. An odd but dealable life came under attack from a tyrannical government, and he ended up hiding in a cabin in the woods for a decade. He almost lost his wife and child in the end. At the point of his retrospection, he was dealing with the aftermath of that government's overthrow, in which most of the trappings of civilization were pretty much gone.

I looked at what I wrote and thought: What?? How did this happen? I'd kinda figured that he would go into a usually boring but stable job doing some kind of computer work, and life would continue on in at least approximately the same pattern in which it had started for him: family, house, traffic, supermarkets, internet access.

This character is no Mary Sue, but his problems and struggles have tended to mirror mine over the years more than any other's. Will his, in turn, become mine? Will I find myself, as I reach my silver years, fighting harder than ever just to survive - rather than getting to relax and enjoy time with my grandkids?

I hope I'm just fear-mongering. I hope that more countries start going in the direction Germany has chosen (they get a full half of their electricity from wind power), and that it happens fast enough to make a difference. I hope the US smartens up and changes its slogan: "We need to end our dependence on foreign oil." I hope that ethanol farmers smarten up and start fermenting the talks, not the goddamn corn itself. I hope that electric cars stop being a novelty, that we change our building habits here in North America so we don't need a car to exist - and that other places in the world stop emulating our bad habits!

I hope. But I'm also going to learn to make a fire by hand, can fruit, and sew...

Focusing

So maybe having a safe space to cry out does help. Regardless, it's a bit better today.
Lack of focus lead to boredom and frustration, which lead to P and I snapping at each other about things that normally aren't problems at all, or that we don't perceive as problems. So sometime after I'd written my little silent shout here, she'd said something and I'd said something and she climbed right off the futon and sat down on the floor... Which didn't seem like a good sign, until I realized that she was just doing the stretches that the massage therapist had given her on Friday.

I'm proud of her for taking a night that seemed wasted and useless, a night that we were both going to want back, and making it productive. I helped her with situps and did my own Tai Chi stretches that I'm trying to get into regularly, and we got to bed at a reasonable time. We went to bed happy with each other and with that healthy flush that comes from good exercise - especially good considering that I had seen the night turning out long, cold and angry.

Today I'm up at seven again, this time to get to a dentist appointment and deal with silly bits of paper at my university. Instead of dragging Phina along with the promise of seeing my parents' kittens again, I'm letting her stay home and sleep. She didn't really want to go and knew she wouldn't really be up to going; and I'm doing ever better at recognizing that when people say 'no', even to piddly little things like going out for the afternoon, you can convince them to stop arguing but you can never convince them to be happy about it. It's better for everyone if I let it go and stop trying to force everything to work out according to how I planned.

Focus

I'm losing it. I'm spending hours refreshing TUL, Facebook, and my email accounts again, as if something is going to change. I had a day or two of heyday activity, handing two or three or four online conversations and threads at once, and now that it's back to normal (dead) I'm haunting the forsaken channels of communication like I have no other choice.
I have half a post written about climate change. I haven't touched it since... Wednesday?
Help me. Please.

Life Update

The college situation I mentioned in 'Power' has been resolved

successfully. The professor had asked if I could drop off P's marked papers

on Friday (which I did); on Tuesday or Wednesday, she emailed to say that

it looked like a 'pass' to her, and there wasn't anything we needed to

worry about. The professor is going to note that those three areas ought to

see some improvement during P's next placement term, but she's letting her

go.

Yay.

I'm relieved, and I feel vindicated (on P's behalf), but I can understand

why she said she just feels kinda weird about it all. It's not much of a

fist-pumping situation to have the world shout "YOU SUUUUUCK" and have it

go "Whoops, sorry, didn't mean that, carry on" a few weeks later. Are we

supposed to cheer? Why did this have to happen in the first place? Our

entwined futures were still riding on someone else's decision, and the

situation working out for P in the end doesn't make the whole situation

suddenly have been okay. She still spent several weeks stewing over the

possibility that one of the few employable talents she has appeared to have

been shat all over. Those feelings aren't going to just disappear.

What is nice, at least, is that yesterday two letters came in the mail

informing her that she made the college's Honour Roll in both her fall and

winter terms. I don't know how much the letters were exaggerating, but

according to them, this is actually quite a distinction. It should look

good on a resume, if nothing else... We'll ask about it sometime. I made

the Dean's List at my university, too, meaning that I maintained an average

of 80% or above (I managed an 83%) for the year.


I'm not going to be able to write a post at all some days, let alone a

long, deep introspective one, but I'm trying. Living life comes first -

documenting it is secondary.

A Practical Note

Whatever my practice ends up being, I'm going to have to include Murphy in my worship... After all, there's belief - and then there's knowing that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. Perhaps I should light a candle every morning (which will always be going out for no good reason) to Murphy... Then again, I think that my simple acceptance that things will go wrong on a regular basis - at the most inconvenient times - may be worship enough.

I can't be an atheist. I believe in too many things that happen outside of science.

A Leg to Stand On

A Leg to Stand On

There's a problem we have in Canada sometimes. We're from all over the place, rarely full-blooded anything - and being 'Canadian' is pretty well meaningless. We have an incredibly weak national identity; we mostly describe ourselves in terms of what we aren't (starting with American and going from there). We take a perverse pride in our cold winters and black flies, drink strong beer, watch hockey, and apologize a lot. Or something like that. We enjoy our status as non-threatening peacekeepers who just want everybody to get along.

That's... pretty much it, folks. No wonder recent immigrants don't want to assimilate (into what?). Dig any deeper, and you've got an ugly story of the French and English duking it out over beaver pelts and lumber for hundreds of years, both royally abusing (i.e. diseasing, poisoning, raping and killing) the indigenous population while somehow pretending to be their allies against the *other* European colonists.

We have a huge cultural divide built into the country in the form of Quebec - it's like a tree split into two at the base. But even then - unless you're French-Canadian and really identify with that side of yourself, the bigger issue is that we are lacking traditions and a purpose. Being almost exclusively immigrants and the children of colonists, we have in our heritages only what came along on boats and ships. We can't dig down to our ancestral roots more than a generation or two, frequently, before we hit 'where we're really from' - England, Scotland, France, the USA, China, Russia, or anywhere else but here. Being Canadian quickly becomes an eclectic patchwork of other cultures.

I wouldn't generalize this to anyone but myself except that 'the question of Canadian identity' is one under constant discussion by sociologists and politicians alike. Somebody even recently suggested we change our national animal to something more imposing than a beaver. We're all hunting for a leg to stand on - a solid foundation from which to grow.

It's even harder to do if you're not white (or don't fully identify as white), Christian, a sports fan, and mildly alcoholic. As soon as you don't like hockey and you don't drink beer (oh, and I don't like poutine, either!), you don't go to church and you don't feel like celebrating the takeover of the country by arrogant Europeans on Canada Day, you just killed 97% of your already scanty national identity.

Personally: I am as mixed of a mutt as one can be while still being mostly European. I have English, French, German, Sicilian, Irish (which was actually Welsh), possibly Dutch, and who knows how many other ancestries. And, knowing my history, I know that 'English' actually means 'Gallic Celtic Germanic Viking', as does 'French'; Sicilian is 'Greek Phoenician Roman Norman [Viking] Arabic'. I'm then seasoned lightly with Cherokee - my great-great-grandmother on my mother's side. I have potential links to many cultures, but almost no knowledge of any.


When I was younger, my family would celebrate more. We did the usual North American run of Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year's, Halloween, and others, combined with the eight Wiccan Sabbats. In fact I have a mischevious memory of having happily written about my three 'Christmases' in my first-grade journal - one at my (Christian) grandmother's house, one at home, and one other at home celebrating the re-birth of the Sun God! (The moral here is that for a child, there are never too many parties.) Mom would do a Circle in the living room before trick-or-treaters started coming to the door on October 31, and we'd offer a few pieces of my candy haul at the end of the night as part of the Samhain ritual. At the same time, I felt no issue belting out Christmas carols about the three kings coming to give the baby Jesus gifts. All was incorporated in one big, happy, strangely unconflicting family of gods, goddesses and divine babies. Either baby Jesus was just a more modern aspect of baby Horus, or they both played together; when I was ten, it didn't really matter either way. I read my Greek myths and my Judeo-Christian myths with equal enjoyment (likely to the consternation of both grandmothers).

For a number of reasons, this all started to taper off as I got older. Now that I've been moved out for several years, I've realized that I'm going to have to choose, or make, my own traditions. I had thought that they travel with you firmly attached, but no; Christmas becomes suddenly hard to celebrate when you're living in a tiny basement, you have no money for gifts, your mother-in-law has left for Venezuela for the whole of December, and you and your partner sit and stare at each other and realize that you're both pagan anyway, so why Christmas exactly? But without a deep enough grounding in what to do for the Winter Solstice, or any other Sabbat or moon cycle or anything at all, we've ended up doing jack sh*t (pardon my language) - nothing whatsoever.

This slip into a no-day-is-holy lifestyle has been wearing and depressing. If no day is special, then you have nothing to look forward to; with nothing to look forward to, why live the boring existence of daily life? That slips towards 'why not suicide?' waaaay too easily - a theme you're going to see over and over in my writing here, unfortunately. I think too hard, and reality doesn't actually stand up to that very well. Anyway...

So I've been out looking for traditions. I've been over that list of nationalities before, trying to decide what it makes me. The trouble is, the ones which ought to have more of a hold on me based on percentage (1/4 Irish/Welsh and 1/4 Sicilian beat out the others quite a bit) are not necessarily the ones that appeal to me as a person. I used to have more interest in Celtic traditions - one way to get around the strong Catholic influence on Irish culture - but I've been shocked in the last few weeks to realize that that interest is nearly gone. I still found myself properly furious when I recently discovered that the 'Irish Potato Famine' was a myth propagated by England at the time to excuse the wholesale sack of Ireland's food supplies to feed British cities... but most of the rest of my old fascination is just a faded memory.

This is actually really serious, since a great deal of my Pagan ideals had been based on what I knew of Celtic and Druidic traditions. I had made myself a Bridgit's Cross a few years ago, did a Maypole dance with the remnants of the pagan community in Niagara, and at that point had generally felt that Herne was the best aspect of the God for me. Where did it go?? At the very point that I've started to search for a culture to finally sink roots into, the one I'd thought I'd grow *from* has turned out to be naught but loose soil.

More to come.