The Smothered Scream of a Wage Slave

I’ve been thinking today about passions, dreams, goals (all of the things our society sugar coats into meaning success, money, and promotions). What really and truly makes me happy? Well, writing of course. Not the manual writing I do for my job or the editing I do for extra money….ACTUAL writing. Soul bending, heart tearing writing. Writing that stops me dead in my tracks as the muse takes over and I stare, dumbfounded, at the page.

If I were to break it down in a more scientific sense I would say that the higher the percentage of concrete is when compared to the percentage of trees is in an area the lower my productivity falls. Basically, cities suck the soul right out of me. It’s hard to write when I look around and no longer hold any hope for humanity and limited hope for the earth as a whole.

“Poetry has been able to function quite directly as human interpretation of the raw, loose universe. It is a mixture, if you will, of journalism and metaphysics, or of science and religion.” –Annie Dillard

It’s in and surrounded by nature that I feel at peace. Not so at peace, mind you, that I would only write sappy love sonnets and the like, but at peace enough that my heart isn’t racing in such fear that putting pen to paper is inconceivable. Sunlight helps, as do stars that aren’t diluted by city lights. Crickets (not of the sound machine variety) calm me like no lullaby ever could.

So, I suppose the problem isn’t knowing what I need to be happy and to write—it’s getting what I need. I won’t get it working my 9-5 job (now complete with overtime) in a building with one window surrounded by the most “city like” parts of my city (pavement, too much traffic, and industry everywhere). Yet how do I go live closer to nature and still make enough money to survive in this society?

I really don’t know the answer to that.

“Yes, there is a Nirvana; it is in leading your sheep to a green pasture, and in putting your child to sleep, and in writing the last line of your poem.” –Kahlil Gibran

My daily schedule is enough to drive anyone insane. I wake up at 5:20am (and it’s dark) get to work by 6am and don’t leave until 5:30pm (when it is also dark). If I want to see daylight at all I need to leave at lunch, where I can get a 30 minute dose of daylight. I get home and all I do is sit, or lay, since I’m so exhausted from staring at a screen all day. Sometimes I try to read, but typically I just fall asleep.

Am I happy with this job? Of course not. How could I be? Yet I sell my life away…

The only semi-agreeable option I know of right now is to go to grad school for my MFA in creative writing. The problem is the school itself is in a city. Yet, at least I won’t be working an office job anymore…

“You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.”
-Desiderata

To Cage a King

An interesting article I read today reads as follows: LINK

SILVER SPRING, Md. (WUSA) -- Rob Ephraim was holding a small point-and-shoot digital camera as he walked around the National Zoo in Washington with his girlfriend on Sunday.

While the pair were passing through the lion exhibit, Ephraim said there were shouts and a splash as something fell off a 13-foot high concrete wall above the moat surrounding the enclosure where two female lions were lounging in the sun.

"Everybody is freaking out thinking that a kid has just fallen into the lion exhibit and all of a sudden, out pops a little deer head," Ephraim recalled.

Relieved to see a deer rather than a child swimming in the moat below, attention went immediately to the lions.

"They reacted right away," Ephraim said. And the 25-year-old was prepared with the camera.

The resulting video, posted to YouTube, has been seen around the world.

First, the lions shadow the deer as it swims to one end of the moat. One lion jumps in to get the deer, but breaks off the attack.

Later, the lions corner the deer in a stairwell as concerned zookeepers look out a window safely behind steel doors.

"Everybody pretty much thought the deer was done but maybe five minutes went by and you all of a sudden heard some yelps and the deer literally came flying out," Ephraim said. The lions again chased the deer across their yard as it jumped back in the water.

"They were like big house cats toying with a bird that flew in the house," Ephraim said.

Shortly thereafter, police showed up and cleared the area.

Zoo officials say the lion keepers were then able to lure the cats to their secure indoor enclosure.

With the yard safe, staffers tried to rescue the deer.

It was so badly injured, a veterinarian was forced to euthanize it.

The deer most likely entered the zoo property from the adjacent Rock Creek Park and took a wrong turn in a panic, according to zoo officials.

Ephraim said the deer "appeared out of nowhere" and jumped through a crowd of people as it leapt over the concrete barrier blindly down to the moat.

"This is what they do," Ephraim said about the lions. "Seeing them in a caged enclosure is not that interesting. Seeing them actually go after something in the wild and use their instincts is very interesting. I'd pay to go to Africa to see this!"

Written by Scott Broom 9NEWS NOW & wusa9.com

I had to think about this for awhile to figure out what my take on it was. I obviously felt horrible for the lions, as I do for any animal kept unwillingly in a captive situation. I also felt bad for the deer, since its own natural habitat had obviously been so encroached upon that, horrified, it ended up in a zoo and ultimately in a lion’s cage.

I don’t think that there’s an easy answer for what should have been done by humans in this situation since creating the situation in the first place was a mistake.

I find it sad that the lions still remembered (at least slightly) how to hunt, but not how to kill their pray. The deer still knew to try to run, but not to avoid humans in the first place (which would have kept it out of the zoo). Euthanizing the deer after the lions had attacked it seems like a strange move. Many people that commented on the article said that there were “children watching” who didn’t need to see an animal killed and eaten by wild animals.

How sheltered are children these days? It’s okay for them to watch it on Animal Planet but not in real life? Children need to know that in what’s left of the wild animals don’t go shopping at Pick N’ Save for meat, they hunt it.

I guess I’m pretty much disgusted by the whole situation. I don’t think that killing the deer and tossing its body was the solution. Letting the lions at least eat what they had hunted would have been fine.

What the Caged Bird Isn't Singing

Why our nation is doomed....

Two words:

Big Bird.

Now you may all be laughing right now, shaking your heads and wondering how on earth a cuddly yellow bird could possibly be responsible for the eventual downfall of America. Well, friends, I intend to tell you.

It’s really quite obvious when you think about it. Sesame Street has been around since 1969. That should make the characters that have been on it the entire time (Big Bird included) 40 years old this year. Did the beloved birdie turn 40 however? Definitely not.

Instead of having their characters age like normal individuals on any other street that isn’t Sesamied on earth the Sesame Street gang have decided that Big Bird should turn the same age each year. Until 1991 Big Bird had been four years old for quite some time. In 1991 he turned six (jumping two years somehow). So now, there’s a 40 year old giant bird with a creepy sounding voice pretending that he’s 6 influencing the children of America and around the world.

No wonder our country is going to hell! We have entire generations of children growing up thinking that aging doesn’t happen. When I was young and pointed the enraging fact of Big Bird not aging out to my mother, do you know what she did? She sent me to my room for a nap! We keep sleeping on this major issue and LOOK WHAT HAPPENS. Ice caps melting, rainforests, gone, unnecessary wars!

Don’t even get me started on the fact that the poor bird lives in a city with barely any grass in sight…

When Ethics is Taught by Capitalists...

Is a life without pain any more of a life than one without pleasure?

I read this article the other day and was truly amazed that this is even a consideration. People are so cold sometimes, most times, I suppose. It still amazes me that there is such a disconnect between the individual in modern society and other living beings on this planet, both human and non human.

Pain free animals? You have got to be kidding me. Couldn’t we just strive not to hurt animals? Making them not feel pain is in many ways a higher level of cruelity than inflicting the pain to begin with.

From the Article:
"If we can't do away with factory farming, we should at least take steps to minimize the amount of suffering that is caused," says Adam Shriver, a philosopher at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. In a provocative paper published this month, Shriver contends that genetically engineered pain-free animals are the most acceptable alternative (Neuroethics, DOI: 10.1007/s12152-009-9048-6). "I'm offering a solution where you could still eat meat but avoid animal suffering."

The fact that this “philosopher” just assumes there is no alternative to factory farming makes me wonder how much research he has done. He acts like there really is no other choice but to torture animals, and that to ‘improve’ this ‘unavoidable’ situation he wants to genetically take away the ability to feel.

Perhaps looking at the human equivalent of this phenomenon will shed some light. Let’s take a look at Gabby Gingras. Here’s a CNN article on her.

From the article:

She has a disorder known as CIPA -- congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis. Although she can feel touch, her brain doesn't receive signals that she's experiencing pain, and she hardly sweats. If Gabby broke her leg, or put her hand on a hot plate, or if her body was overheating, she wouldn't know.

It is an extremely dangerous condition, and very rare. Gabby's doctor, Dr. Peter Dyck at the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minnesota, estimates there are only 100 documented cases of CIPA in the world.

"Not being able to feel pain is a terrible disadvantage," Dyck said.

Steve and Trish Gingras first noticed something was wrong when Gabby was 4 months old. She was biting her fingers until they bled. By the time she was 2, her teeth had to be removed so she wouldn't hurt herself. Now, she must eat very small bites of soft food -- and like everything else she does, she eats with gusto.

The problems with not being able to feel pain start small but grow into a huge issue. At least in Gabby’s case her parents can communicate with her and when she was 5, in 2006, she understood (at least to an extent) her condition.

Taking away an animal’s ability to feel pain is a danger to both the animal and to the handlers of the animals. Lameness will be much more difficult to detect in animals along with other medical conditions. I have no idea how the lack of pain would effect birthing in mammal breeds.

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathize with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better. --Oscar Wilde

All of those practical problems hold nothing compared to the fact that removing pain from any living thing is fundamentally wrong and not humanity’s right. Humans would never truly know if the animals’ ability to feel pain was gone. I had a discussion with a woman that lives and works on a dairy farm a little over a week ago and she was convinced that non-modified cows do not feel pain. There is no limit to the ability of people to blind themselves to things when they choose to. Genetically eliminating the ability to feel pain will probably do nothing more but increase the unfit conditions that are factory farms.

Direct Deposit

Only in Western Civilization would this article ever exist: Should You Sacrifice Love for Work?

The fact that such an article not only exists, but that a “reputable” news agency like CNN ran it makes me sick. Love or work? Really?! There are very few people I know that actually love their jobs. Most of them are simply putting up with them so they can pay their bills and finance happy hour. Some people I know actually hate their jobs. The ones that love them are few and far between and seem to mostly be business owners.

(Most)People get jobs for one underlying reason, to make money. People want to make money for all sorts of reasons. To pay off school debt (my main reason), have a nice house, a nice car, show off, travel (which I do wish I could do more of), and many others. Why people justify their jobs is not what I’m particularly interested in however. What I am interested in/disgusted with is the fact that it is mainstream to choose a job that you likely don’t even love over a person you do.

I don’t care if you work for a fortune 500 company and have an office with a view. If you meet the man/woman that you love it shouldn’t matter. If having them in your life requires you to drop the job that pays you six figures, do it. I could pull on about 1,000 clichés right now discussing never putting money over love. I won’t do that, but keep in mind that old wisdom often becomes cliché over time.

This society is so based on being solitary. It’s quite frowned upon for people to work together that have a romantic relationship, yet this is something that essentially used to happen all of the time. In many, if not most, indigenous societies people lived in thriving, functioning communities unlike anything we see often today. Men and women in love and not in love worked side by side. They may have had different tasks that separated them on some days by several miles, but they were a community, and were never too far apart. I highly doubt they had any discussions about whether to go gather food or be in love, they were things that existed together and wouldn’t make any sense to separate.

The careers of the twenty first century, however, are all about separation. Separation from ownership and the employees. Separation between the office workers and those in the factories. Separation from the factories and the results of their production.

Profiting off of both human and non human pain and suffering REQUIRES separation.

This separation then leaks into other areas of our lives, including relationships.

Don’t let it. Never be the one who gave up love for a dependable direct deposit.

Artificial Communities

I was driving to work, per the usual, early this morning when I realized that I see the same group of cars/people at a certain intersection during each commute. There’s the large mail truck that takes the turn too slowly, the biker in all yellow who looks nervously at the cars, the woman in the black coup doing her makeup. As this realization struck me I felt comforted that I held a place in this commuting community. I felt comforted, that is, until I put some more thought into it.

This “community” I’d experienced was an artificial one. Our society is full of such artificial communities and even goes so far as to market them as real ones. As humans it is natural for us to want to belong, to have a network of people that make us feel safe. I live with two roommates I found on Craigslist. I did this partially to save money, but mostly to establish a living community that I’d been missing while living alone. While I do converse with the two women I live with, they barely know me. Compared to the people that live downstairs, however, they know a lot. My downstairs neighbors make us women feel safe. There are there men that we occasionally say hi to on passing. We take comfort in knowing they are there. We feel like they are part of our community, but they aren’t. All that we know about them is that they seem to bike everywhere and listen to music with a lot of bass until around 10:30pm.

"We were born to unite with our fellow men, and to join in community with the human race." -Cicero

Genuine communities don’t seem to exist much anymore, at least not in cities. People can live for years next to one another and never spend more than ten minutes in conversation. This disconnect wasn’t always the case and I’m sure in some smaller communities that it doesn’t exist at all.

I grew up in a small town in Wisconsin. I knew my neighbors, as did my parents, and it wasn’t unheard of to run to one of their houses within a two block radius and ask to borrow something. Be it the cliché cup of sugar or an air compressor or tool of some sort. We all borrowed things to one another without question. I would spend hours playing with the neighborhood children, laughing, having a blast. We varied in age by over five years but we were still the best of friends. But now, over 15 years later, we have all drifted apart. The neighbors my parents would spend hours talking to on back porches have moved away, their houses have been torn down. New houses all from the same mold and builder have taken their place with neighbors they might mumble a hello to in passing.

What destroyed the community? What is the culprit? I could go ahead and blame Western Society without even blinking as I so often do for problems such as this, but I believe it’s necessary to go deeper. It would be naive to say that Western Society wasn’t around 15 years ago when I was busy playing sports with my neighbors. I’m sure that some children still have similar experiences, somewhere, today. What I think it comes down to is understanding Western Culture as a disease. The disease has many stages that slowly progress to total decimation. When I was a child we were in a stage several before the stage we now sit in. Although a community existed then it was still quite watered down compared to communities in the 1800’s, which were watered down compared to communities 200 years before, and so on and so forth.

"There can be no vulnerability without risk; there can be no community without vulnerability; there can be no peace, and ultimately no life, without community." -M. Scott Peck

This society is slowly sweeping away our connections with each other and with the land we live on. We no longer blink when we find out a low income housing complex will be torn down to build condos. We do not borrow sugar from our neighbors, we chain our doors against them. We establish artificial communities in our commutes, online, and in our minds.

Let’s get over this block we’ve created (or had created for us) against meeting and knowing people. Perhaps I’ll go visit my downstairs neighbors today, bring them some cookies and get to know them. It would be a start, at least.

Good, Better, Best, Never Let it Rest, Until the Good is the Better and the Better is the Best!

As most of you know, I ran Cross Country and Track in high school, but when I decided to start running competitively again this summer it had been five years since my last race. I had no idea what to expect, all I knew is that my competitive spirit was still very much intact and that I’d keep pushing myself.

"Every morning in Africa a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must move faster than the lion or it will not survive. Every morning a lion wakes up and it knows it must move faster than the slowest gazelle or it will starve. It doesn't matter if you are the lion or the gazelle, when the sun comes up, you better be moving." - Maurice Greene

I entered my first race, a 5k to push myself to start running regularly again. I didn’t anticipate being competitive in the overall top finishers, and had no idea what to expect for a goal time. I ended up being second in my age category and winning a hat (random I know). We mapped the course to figure out our slow times and realized it was an extra 1k! After that, I was hooked. I remembered everything I loved about running in high school and knew that not much would tear me away now.

"I always loved running...it was something you could do by yourself, and under your own power. You could go in any direction, fast or slow as you wanted, fighting the wind if you felt like it, seeking out new sights just on the strength of your feet and the courage of your lungs." - Jesse Owens

Over the course of the summer I ran several more races, placing each time and getting more and more hooked. I ordered some awesome road race shoes and realized that even without a team like the one I loved in high school I could have a blast running.

The last race I ran was on October 7 and I ended up getting a PR. Granted I’ve only been running 5ks this season, but improvement is improvement.

"The woods are lovely dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep." - Robert Frost

My goal now? Well, I signed up for two trail races in November, the much loved Turkey Trots. One is in my current city, the other in my home town on the trails I ran in high school. I will be breaking out the spikes that haven’t seen the light of day in five years and pushing out what I hope will be the best times of my 5k career. I am going to start concentrating on training how I should be. No more 3mi runs each day and calling it quits. I will incorporate intervals, long slow distance days, hills, and even some 800 repeats (just need to find a track around here to use for that).

Knees: All through high school I had horrible issues with tendinitis in my knees. It’s still there, for sure. I have been wearing Cho-Pat straps under the kneecaps however and that seems to be solving most of my problems. If they really start to bother me I’ll take a day or two off (something I would never have dreamed of doing in high school). Hopefully they will continue to hold up, I’m not sure I could give up running again.