New Year’s Resolutions

Here’s my list of resolutions:

Stop reading political blogs. I’ve read a post by David Pollard (“How to Save the World”, in the blogroll) which simultaneously celebrates folks such as the political bloggers, especially the liberal ones, for their ideals and sense of community, while at the same time observing that their zeal for political solutions is a distraction which actually serves “The Man”, the 1% of all of us representing the political and economic elite. I’ve come to agree with him that they’re a distraction from other things I really should be doing. His solution, which is to just walk away and form communities of love and conversation while civilization lasts, sounds beguiling but seems to be an invitation for chaos, conflict and megadeath to join the party early (a bit more about apocalyptic visions in a minute). I’d rather go down fighting for civilization, but I agree with David that fighting doesn’t involve worrying about which presidential candidate is going to win the New Hampshire primary.

Stop paying attention to apocalyptic visions. Most everyone has their own version – for many Christians, it’s the Rapture. Science fiction-reading geeks have the Singularity. Deep Greens have Peak Oil and the ecological footprint. Greenpeacers have “Our Stolen Future”. Neocons have the Long War. I recognize this tendency as identity politics. David Brin points out that human nature always conspires against Enlightenment. Another perspective is that perhaps there is a bit of a human longing for catastrophic events. There is probably a nasty fall of one sort or another waiting for us humans, but hoping for it just to be able to say “I told you so” is the coward’s way out.

Have less stuff. We’re moving soon, and I am in the process of giving away a lot of stuff and hauling away more in the mother of all dump runs (yes, I know that’s a BAD THING; but we might as well get use to the fact that we will be mining landfills for resources some day soon). David Brin, who’s going on the blogroll, had an interesting perspective on our trade deficit and Walmart culture, noting that our penchant for buying stuff may have lifted a chunk of the Third World into the middle class. Still, it’s unsustainable, and as a species, we’re going to need to find a better way to spend our time and to make money beyond making and buying stuff (see below).

Start finding something else to do. I could probably spend the rest of my productive life cleaning up hazardous waste. But over the next few years, I’m going to turn my efforts to working on climate change. Very, very soon, we need to exert an effort reminiscent of the New Deal, the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Project combined to reverse the damage, and it’s going to be a better way to spend our time than packing Walmarts with cheap Chinese-made stuff then buying it. So over time, I’ll be taking my existing skills developed from 20 years of hazardous waste investigation and cleanup and applying them to issues such as increasing energy efficiency in buildings and implementing carbon sequestration.

Celebrate the sparks of human ingenuity and initiative when I encounter them. For example, the Z Recommends consumer information site, which published a survey of baby bottle and cup manufacturers, ranking those using polycarbonate which could leach bisphenol-a as opposed to those manufacturers who use other plastics. Or Nanosolar, which manufacturers extremely thin and flexible solar panels. Or MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) program, allowing you to take college-level courses online for free.

Start writing more: more posts to Impact Analysis. I write when I learn about stuff, so perhaps the more I write the more I’ll learn. Look at it as exercise for the brain, and, if you’re going to exercise, pick something that’s strenuous and that you’ll enjoy. “Exercise” and “enjoyment” don’t go together for most people, which might help account for the epidemic of overweight and obese people in the U.S. Also, I’m starting another blog that chronicles my adventures in fitness. Over the past several years, I’ve steadily lost body fat and become stronger. There’s a lot to share about how those things happen. I want to publish something that makes money, perhaps a book or an e-book or an article; I have ideas in all those directions. The wealth-creating aspect is not driving this resolution. Most writers don’t sustain themselves by writing along. But it would be a kick to have people pay to read something I’ve written.

Flotsam and Jetsam I – Travel Blues

Ships' goods which are lost at sea. Also used figuratively in non-nautical contexts to means odds and ends, bits and pieces.

A lot of these are piling up right now as the impending start-up of another blog, the day job and travel pull me away from blogging here. Business travel is especially galling these days, as airline executives are no longer ashamed to just say it to their customers’ faces, “fuck you, we’ll treat you any way we please because you don’t have a choice but to fly with us”. Congress, with war, a storm-ravaged city not rebuilt yet, health-care crisis, housing market crisis and global climate change, having time for hearings about JetBlue holding passengers hostage for hours on the tarmac, is more evidence that things must be pretty bad travel wise. My recent air travel experience included arriving to my destination four hours late, partly unavoidable because of a weather delay, and not being late on the return only because of the foresight to have a long layover. I was overbooked on one flight, a fact that wasn’t revealed until I reach my seat to find someone else with an identical boarding pass in it. Only through the dedicated effort and persistence of a flight attendant in finding me a seat on a theoretically sold-out flight did I avoid missing getting home Friday night. The long layover was key because we departed late while my seating was being sorted out. While I was on the road this week, several people wondered at my plan to drive 300 miles to get to Friday meeting, which entailed greater expense than flying in addition to hours behind the wheel. I had reasoned that, from an inconvenience perspective, driving wasn’t any worse than cooling my heels in an airport. I don’t have the insane productivity skilz to get a lot of work done in airports (and unlike many people, flipping through my e-mails and typing ungrammatical responses with my thumbs on a Blackberry doesn’t really constitute “work”), there’s always a battle for a seat next to an electrical outlet in the terminal, and the need to guard your stuff from thieves, terrorists and TSA means you can’t get up when you please and walk away to grab some coffee, something to eat or to use the can, without shutting down the computer and packing everything along. Besides, this was a meeting I simply couldn’t be late to, and I’ve lost faith that any airline these days can get me anywhere within four hours of my designated arrival time.

So, with things such as airline travel draining the life force from me, several events have passed by during my blogging hiatus. Hopefully, there will be more later.