Magic Spot Flowing

Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.
–Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

This beautiful expression reminded me of a conversation I had with my dad a while back about spending and saving money. We both enjoy watching money accumulate, and tend not to buy things, even though we can afford them. We were talking about what luxury means, and how it can be easy to become jaded by what once seemed a luxury, unless you make a conscious effort to avoid that.

When I was a kid, my stocking always had an orange in the toe, and although I understood it was tradition, I never really knew why. I just figured that it was supposed to balance out the candy.

The quotation comes after a description of Kingsolver’s daughter Lily eating one of the tangerines they bought for the winter holidays after an eight-month hiatus on citrus, which isn’t grown in their local area and wasn’t in the high season anywhere nearby until then. Eating locally, citrus returned to being the luxury it was in the time when it became a tradition to have it in the Christmas stocking. It once would have been as treasured as the candy, maybe more so. But with the trend in shipping everything everywhere, it became an everyday thing. I don’t think I knew where oranges came from until after I was an adult, much less that they have a season.

Since I’ve been buying most of my produce at the farmer’s market, I’ve been incidentally eliminating a number of things that aren’t in season now, or aren’t grown at all near here — like bananas, also once a daily or weekly part of my diet, also once fruits that I didn’t recognize as denizens of a faraway place, possessed of their own season.

Bananas that cost a rainforest, refrigerator-trucked soymilk, and prewashed spinach shipped two thousand miles in plastic containers do not seem cruelty-free, in this context. A hundred different paths may lighten the world’s load of suffering. Giving up meat is one path, giving up bananas is another. The more we know about our food system, the more we are called into complex choices. –AVM p. 225

There’s something worthwhile about making sure that our ideas of everyday and luxury items, or everyday and luxury behaviors, don’t get too out of whack. The more we see as everyday, the less we have to get excited about on special occasions, the less excited we can get, and the more boring life seems. Or we keep seeking out greater and greater thrills, until our consumption and behavior become extreme. I’m happy to put limits on my everyday choices, both food and otherwise, if it means I gain more pleasure on the occasions that I allow myself to step outside those limits. And if it means the world will still have some resources available for all of us down the line.

This is a difficult line of reasoning, though, because where do we draw the line? Every day of my life is profligate luxury compared to some, yet very moderate compared to others. I don’t eat only beans and rice and live in a hut without running water; I don’t live in a multi-bedroom house, drive a Hummer, and wear diamonds.

What are we called on to do? This question is not academic in these early days of serious thinking about climate change and fossil fuel limits. McKibben raises the same question in Deep Economy: what are we all called on to do? We obviously have to give a great deal up, because right now our country of 5% of the world’s population is using 25% of its resources, but those in other countries want some of the benefits we’ve gotten from our cheap-fuel economy. Where in the middle do we meet? For now, I’m going to I hope it’s someplace where all of us choose some moderation, and we all also enjoy a few luxuries. And I’m going to keep looking for the place on the the scale where I feel like I’m doing the right thing by myself and the world.

…I don’t twitter. But apparently several of you do. I’m curious why. It doesn’t really resonate with me — too much announcement, too little interaction, maybe? It seems like Facebook status on crack, with what is entered becoming a kind of social performance piece to up the entertainment value. It reminds me of the way AIM messages were used in college when everyone was logged on all the time, often either vaguely mysterious or highly uninformative. I got uncomfortable with that during my extended AIM hiatus in Scotland, and now the idea of updating people on my status even as often as I do on Facebook (which isn’t very) seems odd to me.

Thoughts?

Back at the beginning of this blog’s existence I wrote some about Barry Schwarz’s book The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less. Recently I’ve thought that maybe he should have written a bit more about when more is less. He does devote some space to the subject of how meaningless some of our choices turn out to be, how they are not really different from each other. In those sorts of cases he advises that you spend as much time as the thing’s importance merits (usually not much), pick something, and stick to it. But sometimes you can’t because there are no options that are remotely like what you want. This really came home to me in two cases recently.

In one case, I was at a grocery store near work, looking for pita crisps to eat with lentil dip. This store has about a third of one side of an aisle devoted to crackers, but the vast majority of these crackers, probably 2/3 of the total, are either Wheat Thins or Triscuits. There are also smaller satellite brands like Cheez-Its and Ritz and a small section of more gourmet brands like Kashi, Stoned Wheat Thins (not at all like normal Wheat Thins; also, not drugged), Carr’s water crackers, and other oddities. However, none of the oddities includes pita or bagel crisps. There really is very little variety in the offerings unless what you want in variety is endless types of Wheat Thins and Triscuits. Low Sodium, Low Fat, Herb, Parmesan…any flavor and variant you want, but they’re all hard, square, plain or flavored small crackers. Where is the actual variety, the different kinds of crackers? Confined to a tiny portion of the section, and not even including anything other than standard crackers. I wandered through the store looking to see if they had hidden them somewhere else. No luck.

In the second case we were at Target looking for straps that go on the back of your sunglasses and keep them from falling off. Despite offering three racks of sunglasses and a rack of reading glasses, Target does not stock these things. At all. Not in jewelry & accessories, not in pharmacy, and not in sports. I went all over the store looking for this very simple thing which would take up hardly a foot counter space next to the sunglasses if they would just freaking buy some and put them there. There are three racks of sunglasses that all look basically identical and block 99-100% of UV light. Do we need three racks of sunglasses, or could we maybe add one rack of glasses straps? Why not? Target has practically everything except fresh food and extremely large specialty items. Glasses straps do not fall into either category; they should stock them and offer customers one more actual choice, instead of three dozen more identical sunglasses.

As it turns out, if you want glasses straps for kayaking, you should go to the kayak place and buy them there. And I guess if I want pita crisps I have to go to the giant new Safeway, or buy pita at TJs and make my own! It’s not that there aren’t options, but there sure is poor offering of true options at many large stores.

There’s been some kerfuffle around lately after an NYT article on “literary deal-breakers” — that is, what books, or lack of, would make you run away from a date or relationship? Two of the websites I read have a thread devoted to this. Some of the conversation has inspired interesting thoughts about people’s attitude to books and their interest in reading and how that affects compatibility for people who are readers, but a lot of the discussion seems dismissive and shallow to me. You dared to read Dan Brown or Ayn Rand? AWAY WITH YOU!

Here’s what bugs me about this: it means prejudging what the person thinks about the books that are on their shelves.

People have books on their bookshelves for many reasons. Slacktivist is reading Left Behind to do theological analysis on them. I own several books I probably would not have bought that were given to me as gifts and I feel reluctant to get rid of for that reason. Other people buy popular books to see what the hype is all about, and may not have even read them yet. If someone has a lot of self-help books, maybe they’re interested in them for critique, or comparison or systems, or they liked one or two of them but not the rest, or they found a little bit of each interesting but don’t have any fundamental problems that needed to be solved by any of them. One person might like Alexander McCall Smith because he writes about Scotland (or Africa), and another because he writes mysteries. I’ve read several of Larry Lessig’s books and I’m interested in the issues of digital intellectual property, but if I owned the books (I don’t, because I can’t casually buy every hardcover I want to read) it still wouldn’t mean I was a Larry Lessig groupie or agreed with him on everything. At one point in my life I owned a Michael Moore book. I kept it around for a while because he made some good points, but I still think Moore is off-base on a lot of his wilder rhetoric.

For me, it’s a lot more about what people think about the books they have, and if I saw someone with a Left Behind or Ann Coulter book, the first thing I would do personally wouldn’t be to run — it would be to ask whether they’d read them and why, what they thought of them, and all that.

I own a shelf of fantasy books (and more in boxes in my dad’s garage), some of which make up the whole of a series that I used to really, really love but which could legitimately be considered candy-ish and a little trite. But the thing is, I know they’re not high literature. They do, however, have a lot of good world-building, intriguing ideas about morality and government, and interesting characterization. And I’m not one of those people who goes on and on about a fantasy world in real life anymore, even if I was when I was 14. :) They’re not a big part of my life; the fact that I own the entire series is due to my habit of accumulating books and my old fondness for them. I own all the Harry Potter books in hardcover and the first one in three languages, but I’m a lot less interested in the Harry Potter world than some people who own them, and more so than others. I still read a fair bit of fantasy because many fictional worlds are interesting in themselves, and also because I don’t know many better ways of illuminating the way our reality shapes our beliefs and lifestyles than to read a book set in another reality.

If a guy ran away on seeing my book collection without asking me why I own the books I do, I can tell you we wouldn’t be well-matched, but it would not be because he doesn’t like fantasy, but because he’s hastily judgmental in a way that I dislike. Much as I dislike reading some of the content of these discussions, which often sound a lot like literary pissing contests. Oh — your dealbreaker is Dan Brown? Well mine is Jane Austen. He thinks men who read self-help books are wimps. She can’t believe anyone wouldn’t read fiction.

It’s not really about the books, it’s about why you own the books, why you read the books, and at that point it’s more about what you think anyway. Literary dealbreakers aren’t literary, they’re philosophical. And you can’t assume philosophy from simple ownership.

I was looking at a Netflix flier on M’s floor this morning and remarked “Funny they say that the plans start at 4.99 per month when the 4.99 plan really isn’t all that useful.” Then I thought, well, the 4.99 plan is 1 movie at a time, 2 per month. How often do I really exceed that? Right now I can have two out at a time, but I barely watch one per month on average. I do like having the choice of two movies, but practically speaking I don’t need the plan I have. Except that if I were sick or something, I’d want to be able to watch a lot of movies quickly. But Netflix allows you to change your plan pretty much whenever you want, I think (maybe not more often than once a month, but still). You can get an extra movie for a pro-rated amount of the next-higher plan for the remainder of the month, if you decide you need one.

As I was thinking about this, I made a connection to the complaint made in Who Killed the Electric Car? that the car has limited range (and the EV1, specifically, also had limited space). I tend to be confused people’s attachment to having a car that goes hundreds of miles and stores four people and a bunch of cargo when 90% of the time they go under 30 miles and carry one person and a tiny amount of cargo (a job that could easily be done by a bike, SmartCar, or other small vehicle). But here I am, making the analogous decision with my Netflix account.

I told this to M and he remarked that it’s a principle of system design: do you design for peak load, or average load? And there’s a definite desire to design and select for a system that handles peak load, so that the system never fails, even under peak circumstances. If you have the extra resources, why not design for peak load? It’s a psychological thing. We want the system that never fails, so that we can have just one system, and not have to think about having multiple systems, or cleverly designing the system to reduce peak load. It’s a sensible decision in many ways. It’s just that sometimes the consequences are not desirable.

Can we convince ourselves to accept peak restrictions so that the overall system can be more efficient? If my Netflix choice is any indication, it’s pretty hard.

I’ve been paying some attention to the news coverage of the Tour of California prologue that I volunteered for on Sunday, and I’ve wound up pretty disappointed. If the Merc is going to put Ann Killion in the main section, then they should ask her to give a wider coverage of the event and not just cover the sports aspects (or ask someone else to collaborate). And her article had such a heavy focus on doping that it didn’t even really cover the race at all. So we get a main section article that’s basically about the politics of the sport, and not about the event at all. The Palo Alto Daily News focused on the effect on local businesses, safety, and the cost of the event. The pre-event coverage in both papers, with the exception of one article about the bike parking published about a week before the event, was all about road closures and hassle, and none of the articles bothered to mention that there would be free guarded and valet bike parking for hundreds of bikes, so that you could forget the worries of driving and just show up on your bike. In a city and on a campus where parking is scarce most of the time, and for an event where bicycles and people on them are the main attraction, it’s mystifying that not only the parking, but that whole aspect of the event was practically ignored.

What I enjoyed most about the event and volunteering, since I don’t pay much attention to the racing, was that bikes were a big part of the scene. People rode slowly through the crowds, parked their bikes in the SVBC corrals, leaned their bikes against a tree, held them while they chatted with friends, compared them, looked at gear for them, admired them. I saw everything — folders, beaters, commuters, old-fashioned road bikes, AL-carbon and all-carbon racing bikes. Crazy tire colors, custom paint jobs, interesting handlebars. Bikes with baskets, panniers, and Burleys. Kids road and mountain and just regular kids bikes. People rode in lycra and in jeans, in sandals and in special bike shoes. Every bike was doing the right job for the person riding it. There was a pervasive joyous feeling that comes from getting a lot of people who love doing the same thing together to watch the people at the pinnacle of the shared activity. None of that really came through in the news coverage, especially not the news that hundreds of people rode their bikes to, through, and at the event, like it was just the most normal thing in the world.

Update: My SVBC mail alerted me to the fact that had I read the news on President’s Day, I would have seen a much more positive spin on the Tour, even mentioning our valet bike parking. Go, PADN, for an actual article about the actual event.

I’ve been known to complain about the lack of bike advocacy and neglect of bike commuting by racers, particularly Lance Armstrong, since he’s got such a high profile. But Armstrong is stepping up, opening a bike shop that’ll sell a lot of different kinds of bikes and equipment as well as serve as a bikestation. He’s advocating for more cycling and better cycling conditions in Austin, especially downtown. Very cool!

I’m having one of those “peculiarly wide awake at 5am” times, so I thought I’d do my first 101 post on this blog, for visiting the Museum of the African Diaspora this weekend. It’s a nice place, but I didn’t realize that their current exhibition wasn’t quite current yet, and it’s a very small museum (because it’s new), so I ended up a bit disappointed. The exhibit will be called Africa.com (though their title is AFRICA.dot.COM, but I can’t help reading that as “Africa dot dot dot com”), about communication from prehistoric times to now. I hope to go back for it.

They did have some interesting content, and I liked the fact that they have three different aspects of diaspora that they focus on: the origin and spead of humans out of Africa, the modern diaspora during colonial and slave-holding times, and the current diaspora through emigration. They had some informative videos about food, some focusing on dishes (gumbo, beans and rice), and some on a particular food (peanuts, greens, yams). There was also a lot of information about African-influenced music, including some material about symphonic and choral music that I particularly liked.

We also watched a longer video about Toussaint L’Ouverture, a person who was entirely new to me.

Besides it being small, some of the material shows low production quality, which was probably the most disappointing aspect. Lots of weird superimposed animations. Photoshop effect isn’t quite the right word, but whatever the equivalent for video is. And the longer video had a lot of faux drama at the expense of conveying more information. The real story is dramatic enough; I didn’t really appreciate the faux drama.

They also have a nice museum store. I spent a long time looking at What the World Eats while my mom checked out bracelets. And the photomosaic of the African child that is their logo is reproduced large so that you can see it across the street in its entirety, but you can also see all the photos up close, which was really cool. The museum definitely has potential.