We've arrived too late to play the bleeding heart show

A byproduct of going to an environmentally-conscious school, as it turns out, is having daily reminders of wastefulness and opportunities for more sustainable living. There are strategically placed stickers and cards next to light switches or faucets, saying things like "You'd have to do 8,987,892,451 jumping jacks to power this light for 7 minutes." All in all, I say they do a good job in achieving their intended purpose, which I assume is informing me (or if necessary, guilting me) into using less electricity or water. The fact that An Inconvenient Truth has been played a disproportionate number of times at the student center also helps to imply that Al Gore himself will drive-by pepperspray me if I don't comply.

One of the sustainability reminders in our bathroom, hanging from the shower spout next to another sign that tells me in pink lettering how to do an effective self breast exam, says "By reducing the water pressure by 25% during a ten minute shower, you'll save enough water to service an African family for a day."

I think this sign makes a good point. I actually didn't know previously that pressure is something that can be usefully conserved. I also have no doubt that the Average American Family uses water in a gratuitous way that a family in most African countries would find appalling. But really - "African"?

Is the entire continent of Africa really in such a collective state of generalizable negative comparison? And even if it is, is a blurring of dozens of largely destitute and neglected independent states something we want to encourage? It would sound strange to end that phrase with "a European family" or "a North American family," or even "an Asian family," because we're used to hearing about the different, distinguished countries in those areas and after reading that claim we would think to ourselves, "which one?" Our stigma of Poland is different than our stigma of England, and God forbid anyone lump Canada together with the US, so we'd want to know which we were talking about. Conveniently, most people are oblivious enough about nearly every other part of the world that our stigma for any given African country, as diverse as each may actually be, can pretty much fly for the entire continent.

I won't claim any right to be a spokesperson for the Namibian nationalist cause, nor would I claim that I didn't just have to look it up to be 100% sure that Namibia is a country in Africa. I just think that it's odd that we're willing to sacrifice an opportunity to not encourage global geographical and cultural illiteracy for the sake of supposed globally-minded sustainability.

In case you're wondering, some websites (which I won't cite because I'm a dirty plagiarist) just told me that the actual numbers of individual African countries' water consumption, while varied, aren't totally clear. The "water footprint" of Sudan, for example, is as large as the US, but in comparison to us, a lot more of their water use goes to agriculture than personal consumption. Also, naturally, some countries are just richer, and the countries that have abundant rainfall or rivers flowing through them have less of a problem with water scarcity, but that fortuity comes with facing political struggle when the more desolately located countries want the wealth to be shared.

Anyway, the next time I take a shower, I'll reduce my water pressure. But it's going to be in the name of Lesotho and Lesotho alone.

Fate isn't just whose cooking smells good but which way the wind blows

By virtue of who I am, there's a whole range of emotions I don't regularly experience. Immediately coming to mind are anger, rage, depression, panic, giddiness, and what the myspace emoticon list calls quixotism, which despite the definition I kind of want to experience all the time so I can send some much needed love to the two most neglected alphabet characters. Those emotions aren't shunted from my daily life because I try to avoid them, though; it just kind of works out that way. On the other hand, I do reserve the right for myself to actively hate one particular emotion, and for it I will make an exception to this rule. And that is Pity.

It's not like I think that people who pity other people are bad people, considering the conventional reported alternative would likely be callousness/sadism, which are never particularly productive. I just think pity is useless and degrading. Like lobster bibs. My thought process goes something like this:

1. I hate being pitied. I feel like it puts me in a position of inferiority and Mr. Pitier in a position to stand above me, paternally clucking his tongue at my misfortune while he enjoys his status as Not Me.
2. It's not really fair of me to inflict emotions which I hate upon other people, is it? Is it possible to stop pitying?
3. The annihilation of pity wouldn't instantly create a world of monsters. There's an emotion that has an equally humanistic attitude without the condescension called empathy, or even compassion. Empathy is a nice way to say that your heart and aid is with SadPersonX but you trust his capability to cope. Pity is a douchey way of saying that your heart and aid is with SPX because it's your honor and duty as a non-SPX to try to make the poor sap feel like his life doesn't suck so bad.

I honestly don't understand why pity doesn't have more of a negative connotation. Marriam-Webster describes pity as "tender or sometimes slightly contemptuous sorrow for one in misery or distress." Contemptuous! Honestly.

"Thesaurus" sounds like a dinosaur.

"But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about? Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us."

Here's the mutiny I promised you. And here's the party it turned into

At midnight on January 1st, 2008, I was doing pretty much the same thing, with the same people, in the same town, as I had done at midnight on January 1st, 2007. Which sounds like an introduction to a whine fest about monotony, but I'm only pointing it out because, for all intents and purposes, and despite my status as a rock 'n roll youth in a turbulent age, not much has changed in the last year. Predictably, I didn't fail out of college, and further, I have the same job, the same friends, the same major. I switched roommates, added a job, and drive a debatably pimper ride, and nabbing a boy was significant, but it's not like I wound up kidnapped to Sibera only to be resold as a mail order bride to the west coast of the United States or something.

And not to fly in the face of all the resoluting that a new calendar inspires, but I think unless you're at one of those trigger points in life where things actually dramatically change, most people would agree that from 1/1 to 1/1, the scenery hasn't been moved around too much. Which is why resolutions happen - so that things will actually be different - but I think it's obvious that that whole process is more a cycle than anything else.

Plus, again, unless you're in Triggerland, the changes that are most likely to happen to you are going to be unforeseen. Deaths, relationships, job losses, and kidnappings are difficult to schedule. In the spirit of being both realistic and interesting, I think the best thing to do on New Years is to list out the few things you expect to happen, and then break it out the next time you hear Auld Lang Syne and compare it to what actually went down.

Changes I'm Anticipating in 2008:
- Spending the summer either at an internship or at Not At The Barn
- Going to Hawaii
- Moving into my first apartment
- I'll probably buy a new pair of jeans at some point or something

So much to look forward to.