Dispatches from Life

Today I drove from Portland out to Eagle Creek, in the Mt Hood National Forest. It was really gorgeous, with well-maintained trails that rose above the creek until there were sheer cliffs going up on one side and down to the creek on the other. At one point there was a sprinkle coming off an overhanging rock that you could stand under and look up at, only occasionally getting wet. Near the start of the hike there was also a suspension bridge that was fun to walk on. I was hiking with my hosts’ housemate, a late-20s PCA in massage school. We paused and turned around at Metlako Falls, a little stream tumbling down across the path and down a ravine. I commented that the middle of running water feels like a magical place, where evil spirits can’t get to you or something. The drive to the creek took us past Multnomah Falls, and gave us good views of both Mt Hood and Mt Saint Helens. It was a great way to spend my first afternoon in Portland.

Speaking of spending time in Portland, there’s an observation I’ve had about the Northwest that I would like to share with you. In both Seattle and Portland, there is an astoundingly higher number of VW Buses than there is on the east coast. I am curious to see whether the trend continues in San Francisco.

After we got back from the hike, I walked from where I’m staying near Mt Tabor to Belmont, a cute little neighborhood where I found a cafe and dinner. Goals for the remainder of my stay here (until Friday): hang out in Powell’s Books, explore downtown, and hang out with a good contradancing friend who I recently discovered lives here.

I have spent the past week in Seattle, and it’s been a really lovely stay. On Tuesday, I went for a walk along a lake in the city’s arboretum, and then had dinner and games with two good friends. They gifted me with a lovely mandolin, which I have since started to learn. On Wednesday I met one of my favorite writers, which I still haven’t quite wrapped my head around yet. Earlier in my visit to Seattle, I attended the Fremont Fair, with its fantastic parade (including naked, painted bicyclists!) and had a stupendous tour of downtown Seattle, with a focus on art. But despite all these fantastic adventures, the most fun part of my visit was getting to know the folks at whose house I stayed.

Let me first tell you a little about the house and how I came to stay there. It’s three stories, and painted a light shade of purple. It’s on the edge of the lovely Green Lake neighborhood north of the city, one block from the interstate highway. There are five people who live in the house, plus another who mostly lives elsewhere but has a bed nonetheless. I met two of the regular residents plus that occasional resident at Youth Dance Weekend last fall, and they were happy to take me in when I was looking for places to stay in Seattle. So I was very grateful to these three for offering me space.

But I barely saw the three of them my whole week in the city! They were off doing their own thing, and I spent most of my time with the other people in the house. Two of those studied planning during college at U-Dub, and the third bikes everywhere and is pursuing a career around energy efficiency for existing buildings (another great interest of mine). In fact, it turns out that several members of the house were among the naked bicyclists I observed during the Fremont Fair parade. They all entertain guests a fair amount. They are wonderful people, and I have greatly enjoyed getting to know them. I aspire to many aspects of their personalities for when I am living with people in the future.

Today I travel to Portland, Oregon. I hear from several reputable sources that Portland is the paragon of city planning. I’m excited!

Today I’m feeling exceedingly unproductive. I’ve gone over my to-do list several times, but I just don’t feel like doing the things on it. I’ve decided that that’s okay. This is related to the One Thing strategy for dealing with overwhelming to-do lists, except it allows for avoiding your responsibilities entirely (as long as they’re not that urgent). Our lives are filled with urgent tasks. When you have the luxury of a not-urgent spate of things to do, take the opportunity to indulge in some procrastination. Read a book. Play some music. Work on a puzzle. Am I merely justifying how I spent my day today? Perhaps. But maybe it’s legitimate, too! Give it a try next time you have the chance, and let me know whether or not you think I’m full of shit.

“Life moves pretty fast. You don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
- Ferriss Bueller’s Day Off

Recently I went to a contradance where I really didn’t like the caller’s style. She exuded a sense of stress that I think made it much harder for the many beginners to learn. She made contradancing seem hard rather than fun. There were also many specific things she said that seemed more controlling than I felt comfortable with. I ended up never talking to her about it, because I couldn’t come up with a friendly, non-hurtful way to say it.

So how about it? How do you inform someone that you think they’re doing a bad job without offending them?

It was suggested to me that I write some blog posts about the basic workings of government and politics. I follow such things relatively closely, and I’d love to share with you some of my perception of how things work in Washington.

The Basics: The House of Representatives passes a bill. The Senate takes a look at it, hems and haws, waters the bill down, and passes a crappier version of it. The bill goes to conference committee. The conference committee is made up of a few powerful Senators and House Reps, from both parties, and they hammer out a compromise bill. That bill has to be passed by both the House (easily, usually) and Senate (easy only in an ideal world). Finally, if both houses of Congress have passed the bill that comes out of committee, the president signs the bill into law. After a few years (in many cases) the bill actually starts to take effect.

So that’s bicameral legislation. Sometimes the Senate starts this journey, and sometimes conference committee is arrived at through bills from each house of Congress that are separate but on the same topic. In neither house is “good policy” the primary consideration of most members of Congress. Their primary concern is the perceived popularity of the measures on which they deliberate. That perception is formed partly through polls, but more common factors are media coverage, the Congressman’s ideological perspective on the issue, and the character of discourse amongst the Congressman’s party and social group (which consists mostly of his or her colleagues, with a remarkable amount of cross-party socializing). Also, the path of legislation through each body of Congress is dictated by strict and bizarre rules and traditions that are sometimes as nonsensical as the strangest of religious traditions. Many of the traditions and rules of Congress originated in a time when there was more camaraderie of purpose, and when the wellbeing of the American people as a whole truly stood before political gain in the eyes of most of the Congress.

It’s a pretty fragile system, where institutional obstructionism in any of the House, Senate, or Presidency can force progress to a halt. If you don’t like the way it works, if you actually want to fix things instead of just complaining, you have to talk up and support a group that’s doing something about it.

This is fun! I’ll write more about some aspect of this process before very long.

Recently I spotted a review of cross-country travel on Amtrak in the LA Times. I recommend checking it out, though it’s not at all my experience. The writer, Karl Zimmerman, took pretty much the most posh train trip he could, whereas I’m taking a lower-budget, lower-key trip, with my only on-train splurging for meals in the dining car. I am also reminded of conversations with friends and relatives who also have taken long train trips. Their experiences are rarely as extravagant as Zimmerman’s, but are usually more luxurious than mine: sleeping cabins and less hopping on and off the train. These are all different, legitimate ways to travel on Amtrak.

Everyone has different experiences when traveling, with some very similar experiences diverging widely in enjoyment, and some very different experiences matching each other closely in their success. I am excited to (finally) dig into the first of my travel books (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) now that I’m done with The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I am sure that Zen and On the Road when I get to it will change the way I think about my own travels, and I look forward to that more cultured perspective.

[The title of this post is a reference to a piece of music by Steve Reich. It's about the difference between the experiences he had as a child traveling across the United States and the experiences of European Jews on the death trains of the Holocaust. You can listen to it, along with a nice accompanying video, here:]

Today I got lunch with one of my favorite bloggers, David Roberts of Grist. We talked about a lot of things, but one of my takeaways from the meeting was that there need to be more community-based efficiency and alternative energy programs. Making it easy for individuals within a community and a community itself to make these changes is the key to bottom-up change in this regard.

One initiative that David mentioned was WeatherizeDC, a campaign started by former leaders of Obama’s campaign and based on grassroots techniques used therein. First of all, they go around knocking on doors, increasing community demand for efficiency retrofits (also getting interested community members together in meetings). They brokered a Community Workforce Agreement with a home performance business based in DC, whereby the increased demand from these groups will result in the business hiring local residents from communities with high unemployment. Green job creation in practice.

Why aren’t there more initiatives like this? You or I could start one in our areas!

Generally, I’m a pretty anti-stress person. I endeavor to make my life simpler and calmer, eliminating or circumventing sources of anxiety. But although I still roll my eyes a little every time I hear someone distinguish between “distress” and “eustress“, I wish to write here about positive and negative stress.

There isn’t necessarily a sharp dividing line between negative stress and positive stress. Frequently, I believe, the positive aspect of stress comes in retrospect, from looking at the internal or external product which the stress helped create. However, the most rudimentary distinction between the two is that positive stress comes from a challenge, whereas negative stress is more Sisyphean and futile. Positive stress is a challenging task at work, a tough work-out regimen, or a 20-page paper to write. Negative stress comes from frustration or annoying peers or a seemingly endless workload.

The difference is ultimately about confidence in one’s ability to solve or adapt to the problem. But that doesn’t mean people feeling deficient in confidence have no recourse but negative stress. Instead, an attitude of acceptance and belief that “everything will be all right” can make everything seem sunnier.

Yesterday I lost track of time in the morning and had to run for half an hour to get to the bus out of Vancouver. It was a bummer of a situation, and I was definitely stressing out the whole time. But I did make it, and even if I hadn’t I would have been able to catch another bus. And furthermore, it harshly reminded me that I need to keep track of time leading up to a deadline. We learn things, and sometimes we can do so without stress, but most of the time we make mistakes or experience stress, and that is how we learn.

Do you have any specific methods for turning negative stress into positive stress?

If there’s one lesson which the healthcare legislative battle taught the American public, it’s that even with huge Democratic majorities, the federal government (in its current power structure) is very inefficient and ineffective at doing good things. As always, this is in large part due to our political complacency and visceral disengagement (feedback loop anyone?) partly manufactured by corporate advertising misdirecting our attention toward Snuggies or Glee or Shrek. If we put more pressure on Congress and the Administration, we will get better results. But that sort of pressure is not comfortable. It involves frequent and repeated calls and letters, marching in the streets, and getting the attention of the glassy-eyed television news media. It requires an informed and engaged citizenry.

Needless to say, if that sort of pressure didn’t happen with healthcare, it’s tough to imagine it happening for climate legislation. Amidst my anguish at the loss of life and livelihood and habitat related to the BP oil spill, I was hopeful that the associated public anger would transform into political pressure on our “leaders” to effect some worthwhile legislation.

That said, many populist approaches to transitioning off fossil fuels are already going. David Roberts has a recent article in Scientific American on the potential scaling up of distributed energy and efficiency measures. The Transition Town movement of community-driven initiatives seeking independence from oil is gathering steam across the country. And there are also more hopeful chances for change going on in government as well. Peter Lehner of the NRDC points at the transportation funding capability of congress as an area in which a lot of progress can be made. Because that budgetary area is affected by about 5% of the lobbying money that was present in the healthcare fight, maybe there’s some hope there. Also, a proposal like Ezra Klein’s, to include externalities in the price of oil (which would apparently increase the price of oil by $1.65 per gallon), seems like it might be a good way to harness popular despair about the oil spill. Of course, conventional wisdom holds that such an increase would be unpalatable for the American people, but who knows.

These are just a few ideas and movements already under way. We should all do our best to further efforts like these to bypass the primary governmental artery of legislative change, because it has become congested by the toxic pollution of corporate money. Perhaps something world-changing will come out of the US Social Forum this week. But we all need to step it up. That whole American innovation thing? Let’s show how it’s done.

When you’re traveling by staying with friends, you can’t have assumptions about the sort of hospitality your receive. Some people aren’t able to provide you with more than floor space on which to lie: no food, no blankets, no social attention. That’s okay, because everyone’s hosting capacity is different.

But most people who have put me up for a few days go above and beyond the minimum. For example, my first hosts in Seattle were fantastic, offering more than I would ever expect from a host. They paid for restaurant meals twice, took me on a tour of the city, and even did some laundry for me. When people display such radiant hospitality toward me, I can feel nothing but gratitude toward them.

But such extravagant hospitality isn’t required to be a great host. Here are some things I’ve observed about my preferences in hosting practices:

• Wireless internet is my lifeblood. I’m a much happier puppy if I can take a leisurely morning, blogging and emailing and Facebooking in bed.
• Free reign of the food in the kitchen, or at least clear communication about what food is available for me. I’m a much happier puppy if I can have breakfast pretty promptly in the morning.
• A way for me to enter and exit the house. Either hanging out with my host all day, getting a key, or staying in an unlocked house satisfies this desire. I’m a much happier puppy if I don’t have to worry about getting at my stuff.
• When my host helps me figure out the transit system in the city, that’s extremely helpful, because there are always little differences in each city that it’s necessary to understand.

That’s about it. A welcoming atmosphere is the most important thing. I hope to practice some of these qualities when I have a place of my own and have the capacity to host. Are there any good things you especially notice when you’re a guest?