individual

There are a lot of things about New York City that are overwhelming. The movement, the activity, the noise...and the sheer number of people. And it's not just the number of people, there's a certain quality to them too, a tendency towards extremes. My theory is that the city is so big and there are so many things that you could be into, that many people choose to differentiate themselves by being really, really into whatever their thing happens to be.

But even with all diversity of hair styles, body art, accents, clothing, personal hygiene etc., I can feel myself starting to get a bit numb, developing an immunity to individuals and stories in the face of sheer volume.

This Jane Kenyon poem was a reminder:

Man Sleeping

Large flakes of snow fall slowly, far
apart, like whales who cannot find mates
in the vast blue latitudes.

Why do I think of the man asleep
on the grassy bank outside the Sackler
Museum in Washington?
It was a chill
afternoon. He lay, no doubt, on everything
he owned, belly-down, his head twisted
awkwardly to the right, mouth open
in abandon.
He looked
like a child who has fallen asleep
still dressed on top of the covers,
or like Abel, broken, at his brother's feet.

11th

Getting off the subway a block or two from Ground Zero this morning, I kept thinking of these words from this Wendell Berry essay:

...we have not learned to think of peace apart from war. We have received many teachings about peace and peaceability in biblical and other religious traditions, but we have marginalized these teachings, have made them abnormal, in deference to the great norm of violence and conflict. We wait, still, until we face terrifying dangers and the necessity to choose among bad alternatives, and then we think again of peace, and again we fight a war to secure it.

complicit

As I've moved closer to the people and processes involved in making the most basic material goods (food, clothing) in the past two years, the physical world has taken on a new weight. Driving past malls and outlet stores, the sheer volume of the stuff inside is overwhelming. I've had a little glimpse into the lives of those sewing and picking, so that in my more lucid moments I can't grab an appliance off a shelf without wondering how many hands were involved in making it, or pull a shirt off the rack without a peek at the tag to see where it came from.

Being a bit more aware sets me up for an exhausting series of mental gymnastics any time I make a purchase.

Today, for example, I found myself grocery shopping in Walmart. Already I’d had to do some justifying. Walmart is the Big Bad Wolf, up there with other dastardly corporations like Monsanto. They underpay their workers both here and overseas and force local operations out of business everywhere they go.

But…I needed a plastic storage bin. Target would have been my first choice, but it was out of the way and I have a sneaky suspicion my aversion to Walmart is partly a class thing (Target is, after all, where upper middle class folks by their Made in China).

On my list after the storage bin were a number of grocery items (since, as of Wednesday, whatever I eat will have to be transported home without the help of a car). I’d planned on patronizing a local grocery store, but did the impact of the extra gas from the trip outweigh the karmic good of supporting a local family?

So…I found myself grocery shopping in Walmart. Already feeling guilty, my calculating had just begun. How much more was I willing to pay per can of organic beans (and could I even justify beans in a can when the dried varieties were available)? Coffee: fair trade, organic, Rainforest Alliance…could I find all three? If I could buy non-organic brown rice in a bigger bag, did the plastic pollution I saved in any way cancel out the pesticides used in growing? How about salt – would going for the Morton’s be a capitulation to advertising or would choosing the cheaper Walmart brand create downward pressure on prices that often has consequences for workers and the environment? What size cans of crushed tomatoes should I buy – the smaller size (and waste packaging materials) or the larger size (and likely waste food, since I’ll be cooking for one)?

All this, and I get to the check-out aisle and realize I’d forgotten to bring re-useable bags.

At the end of that trip, at the end of a couple weeks of shopping to get ready for life and work in NYC, after so many tiny (and at the same time overwhelmingly significant) decisions, there is this:

A Short Testament
by Anne Porter

Whatever harm I may have done
In all my life in all your wide creation
If I cannot repair it
I beg you to repair it,

And then there are all the wounded
The poor the deaf the lonely and the old
Whom I have roughly dismissed
As if I were not one of them.
Where I have wronged them by it
And cannot make amends
I ask you
To comfort them to overflowing,

And where there are lives I may have withered around me,
Or lives of strangers far or near
That I've destroyed in blind complicity,
And if I cannot find them
Or have no way to serve them,

Remember them. I beg you to remember them

When winter is over
And all your unimaginable promises
Burst into song on death's bare branches.

encounter

One of the great pleasures of the past two weeks has been taking long walks in the evening on the country roads around my aunt and uncle's farm, smelling fresh cut hay and watching the sunset over the corn fields.

One evening I decided to try a new route. I passed churches and old barns and several roadside stands and was pleased to see two white roosters scratching around in one yard. Even more pleased when they started jogging in my direction (yes, I do miss my chickens).

Docile, gentle farm chickens, so well-behaved we let kids play with them.

Except that one of them started heading right for me and making me nervous. Raising, caring for, and (when necessary) disposing of 9 hens gave me no experience in dealing with roosters. A quick search for a branch with which to ward off the potential attack yielded only a couple of leaves. "Maybe he just thinks I'm going to feed him" I thought as I tossed the leaves in the rooster's direction.

Nope.

So I took off running (okay, sprinting) down the road, followed, at a speed I've never seen in a chicken, by the rooster, until I was several houses away and clearly no longer a threat.

I really hope someone happened to be looking out their window.

growing up

Becoming (somewhat) grown-up and getting a (somewhat) grown-up jobs means obtaining some semblance of a grown-up wardrobe. And that means doing one of my least-favorite things: shopping.

For several years I've tried to avoid buying new clothes whenever possible. With a few exceptions for hygiene and safety (new underwear and running shoes), I've managed to clothe myself primarily with thrift store finds and the occasional "donation" from my friends' closets. I've chosen to do so for several reasons.

1. I disagree with the conditions in which most of what's on the shelves is made. I stopped buying new stuff my freshman year of college with a vague sense that the global clothing industry was problematic. Living with garment factory workers in Cambodia did not convince me otherwise.
2. I disagree with disposability. Following trends means buying new stuff as often as the industry wants me to. If I’m only supposed to wear it for a few months, chances are it's not made to last. Making new clothes is also environmentally costly.
3. I can't afford new stuff. And as it looks like I'll be either a student or working low-paying non-profit jobs for the foreseeable future, this is unlikely to change.
4. (This one was a surprise) I like this way better.

Just like I'm lucky that I don't like meat (it makes being a vegetarian so much easier), I'm lucky that I can't stand shopping. I credit this to my childhood. Every other summer my family would return to the US to visit family and friends, gain weight eating American junk food (okay, maybe that was just me), and stock up on what we needed for the following two years. This lent our shopping trips urgency and anxiety. Urgency (because if you don't get what you need from Old Navy now you won't have another chance for 2 years) and anxiety (because how, at age 11, can you be sure that your feet are done growing? and should you buy your jeans expecting that you'll lose the recently-acquired 5 lbs or not?).

But it was more than just the anticipation of long, boring days at the mall and frustrating decisions that made me dread shopping. It was the change I could sense in my spirit, the heaviness of feeling like I needed more and more new stuff that wouldn’t lift until I was back home. Kenya was no non-consumer Eden, but there were fewer options and therefore less anxiety.

In a way, my decision to stop buying new stuff in college was an effort to create a less-choice environment for myself. At first it was scary, and then it became an adventure (a pattern that recurs in my life every now and then). I can appreciate finding my bridesmaid’s dress for a friend’s wedding at a second-hand shop or inheriting a favorite outfit when a roommate moves out as gifts. Getting a pair of jeans I like from a Goodwill is a small miracle.

But. But. I start a new job in a couple of weeks and will need to be dressed professionally. Every day. I don’t often see quality dress shirts or suits in the racks at Salvation Army.

Once again, growing up means getting close enough to what was once black and white to have to taste the gray.

back to where I started

I am back where I was almost exactly a year ago, back in rural Lancaster with the smell of dairies, baked oatmeal for breakfast, and candles in the windows of houses. I'm back to hearing stories of growing up on a farm and being peppered with questions about organic agriculture that I feel only slightly more qualified to answer after my California farming adventure. I'm back to the familiar feeling of living out of a suitcase and some boxes, of being between places and lives. I'm back to trying to picture what's next and acquire appropriate attire (here's to a smooth transition from a job where my uniform consisted of the same pair of muddy jeans and faded flannel shirt every day to something that will most likely require suits and daily showers!).

I'm particularly aware of being in transition and uncertain of what comes next, so it is appropriate that I spent the better part of my evening reading and thinking about a NY Times feature on "emerging adulthood", a new life stage to describe all of us mobile, "self-focused", relatively unattached 20-somethings. We're delaying adulthood (defined as financial independence, marriage, and having children...hmm) in favor of identity exploration and instability. Our lives are characterized by valuing change - moving and switching jobs often, living with romantic partners without being married, living at home... The author gives a nod to several of the forces shaping this trend, including changes in parenting, higher education requirements for jobs, changing sexual norms, but probably doesn't spend enough time on the one that looms largest right now: it's pretty hard to start your adult life if you can't get a job.

But there's a flip side of choice (and privilege) for some of us. I'm fairly certain grad school awaits me some time in the next five years and could make a reasonable guess as to the degree and discipline, but I'm in no particular hurry to get there. Even in this economy, I'm not in a rush to get my academic career started (though this is only Week 3 of unemployment - stay tuned).

It's not that I don't feel the strong pull of libraries and university campuses, and Being Able to Afford My Own Weekly Copy of the Economist is an income category I aspire to and take into consideration when applying for jobs. But I want to spend some time working. Exploring. Trying new things. I know I can do the books-and-writing-and-education thing, and I know I love that. But in even a cursory glance over the last five years I have to admit that the times I grew the most and felt the most challenged and alive were the times I spent doing things I doubted I'd be any good at at all: working as a camp counselor, living in a Cambodian slum, spending a year as a farmworker. Learning a new language. Singing silly camp songs in front of large groups of people. Raising chickens. Taking care of toddlers. Leading yoga classes. Cooking church dinners. The times I've spent realizing I have something more than my brain to offer.

So with that in mind, here begins the next adventure, which will land me (job or no job, hopefully the former) in New York City in a few weeks.

a story, and why I shouldn't move to San Francisco

Every six months or so, when I’m feeling particularly special and original, I’ll spend a few minutes on the blog Stuff White People Like for a little dose of reality. There I am reminded that many of my favorite things (Taking a year off, Indie Music, Scarves, Being the only white person around, NPR, Vegetarianism, Yoga, and Barack Obama, for example) are, in fact not unique to me but are shared by many of my peers of a certain education level, class, political persuasion, economic status and yes, skin color.

I just happen to not run into too many of these other people and can therefore fool myself some of the time into thinking that I am the only one (or at least one of the only ones). This is why I shouldn’t move to San Francisco. I fear I’d lose my sense of identity in a place where organic gardening, fair trade coffee, making your own things, recycling and backyard chickens were passé.

All that to say I can’t resist the opportunity to poke a little fun at myself for the following story.

Food is hot right now. Stuff White People Like includes posts on Picking Their Own Fruit, Hummus, Expensive Sandwiches, Whole Foods and Grocery Co-ops, Asian Fusion Food, Sushi, Breakfast Places, Wine, Microbreweries, Dinner Parties, Tea, and Organic Food.

Food is hot, so how’s this for a boy-meets-girl:

She is working on an organic CSA farm. He is a five-star chef and Healthy Eating Specialist at Whole Foods.

She is probably reading Barbara Kingsolver or Wendell Berry. He is probably reading Michael Pollan or Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals.

She can talk at length about cooking from scratch and the importance of soil fertility. He can talk at length about the origins of pretty much any cuisine. They can both talk your ear off about kale and agriculture in Ventura County.

She’s thinking about a career in development studies with a focus on food security or agricultural issues. He’s about to start a Masters in Food Studies.

Oh yeah, and they met at a farmers market.

True story. His name is Mark. And we share passions for World Cup Soccer, Cooking, People Watching, Camping, Pandora, and Intelligent Conversation, among other things. (Of these, only the World Cup and Camping are featured on Stuff White People Like. I checked.)