Back after another hiatus.

I've been quiet for a month now. The last four weeks have mostly involved me struggling with my personal beliefs and then the beliefs that seem to be held by the larger public health community. One of the things I keep running into is this sense that we should outlaw things like bacon, soda, cigarettes: these things are not good for you, I know. And I confess! I am a habitual user of bacon, an occasional consumer of soda, and I have given up my occasional-cig-when-I'm-drinking habit. But to flat-out forbid their use ever?!

I'm told that I am not liberal enough for public health, in the sense of liberalism as expanding government control. In this, perhaps, I could nearly be considered libertarian!

The other thing I find myself running into is this attitude that poor people are ignorant and obese people are ignorant or lack willpower. Admittedly, it isn't quite explicitly expressed, but there is this general sense that IF ONLY people realized they were engaging in these harmful behaviors, they would stop. That is, obviously, not the case. Smokers continue to smoke, even when people they know die of lung cancer and even after they have been forced outside to smoke in lonely corners, at least fifty feet away from the door (as they should be!). The sense that we have to save people from themselves- this drives me crazy.

Anyway, I just don't feel like this is something I love enough. But I don't know where the hell to go now.

Under the shadow of the god of the forge...

I've been in Birmingham for about a month and a half now, and it's been quite a change from my time in Atlanta. I live close to UAB, so I bike or walk the two miles to class (except for that time that a policeman decided to give me a ride to school). Sometimes I cut through Five Points South because the walk is nicer; other times I stop off at Lucy's Coffee and Tea, a small café on University Boulevard. I like to stop by Forest Perk, another coffee shop that is open later than Lucy's, so I can do homework there.

I can see the sun set over Birmingham from my living room window.


I run a fair amount still; I also work out/play in the parks near my apartment. I go to a small local grocery for most of my produce needs and I can buy local and regional produce pretty easily. That Man came to visit me and we played house for a weekend. We ate well; we also went barhopping, so now I know some good places to go.

For me, Birmingham is full of unexpected moments. I've gone to a park to exercise and ended up fencing with rapiers with some gentlemen from the local SCA. As mentioned above, I've gotten a lift to school from a police officer, who didn't want to make me walk to school in the rain. I've mingled with some great local (and not so local) musicians at the Nick. On one of my lowest days, I ran into a friend from the con-scene while he was going into work and I was leaving class. I don't fit here, not yet, but I feel like maybe I could. Everyone plans around football games, though, which is a totally foreign concept to me.

I went to Dragon*Con (with That Man, of course!) to help promote PlayOnCon. I was all kinds of loopy by the end of the weekend. A friend got this snap of That Man tolerating my goofiness at the promo table.



I took one of the guinea pigs to the park, where she ate grass and didn't get eaten by dogs. These were taken today:





And yours truly in my new Real Deal Brazil hat. It's made of recycled truck tarps.

Respectfully submitted--

Tonight I met up with some folks at the J Clyde, a local pub, for my friend and realtor’s 25th birthday party. Her friend, A, who was already there, had met some football fans who were meeting up in Birmingham for the football game on Saturday. They were from all over the country: Las Vegas, Little Rock, San Diego, Philadelphia. These guys all work together remotely in banking and like to get together to drink and watch football and wreak havoc, like some kind of touring vikings. I had no idea who these people were (and neither did my friend!) but I think they gave her a great birthday. I know I had a good time, talking about art and music and grad school, and having my ego stroked.

“This is going to be the greatest two years of your life! You get to study anything that tickles your intellectual fancy!” one of the guys from Philadelphia told me. “Grad school is about studying, a little bit, but it is mostly about networking and meeting the right people.”

“You’re so positive! You haven’t said one negative word since you sat down. You’re so pretty, and you’re smart, and you’ve got your whole life ahead of you.”

“I’ve got my Ellen Page here,” another said, indicating A, who does look like a redheaded Ellen Page, “and my Ione Skye.”
“Who is that?”
“She’s the smart girl from Say Anything.”

After they had decided to catch a cab back to their hotel, I decided I would walk out with them, since my car was parked a few blocks away, and because they seemed like good guys. By the time we had gotten a block away from the pub, they had arranged themselves in formation, with me in the middle: one in front, two on either side of me, and one behind. One of them pointed out that he had a daughter- hell, they all had daughters- and that they all thought I was attractive, but they were way more interested in making sure I got to my car safely than in trying to have sex with me.
“Well, and you all have wives who will kill you and also me,” I teased, to a general chorus of agreement.

When we got near my car, I thanked them and hugged each of them and got into my car as they got into a cab.

Thank you, again, Matt, Barry, Mike, and Trevor.

I do have my whole life ahead of me, and so far, it’s pretty great.

Briefly, in bullet points, in the wee small hours of the morning.

Dragon*Con has come and gone, school is in full swing, and I am looking to the next event: Alchemy.

I'm craving surreality in my life, in a big way right now. Somehow I didn't get enough at Dragon*Con.

I just finished day one of the 30 days paleo challenge, except that I am going to commit fully to two or three weeks instead of 30 days.

It's very late, but I want to do something creative. Dad gifted me with a tripod, and I want to take a bunch of weird self-portraits.

Maybe I should clean up my apartment before I attempt that. Which means, naturally, I will go to bed instead.

I have a lot of thoughts, but nothing coherent or cohesive enough to share here.

“How to Be Alone” by Tanya Davis

If you are at first lonely, be patient.

If you’ve not been alone much, or if when you were, you weren’t okay with it, then just wait. You’ll find it’s fine to be alone once you’re embracing it.

We can start with the acceptable places, the bathroom, the coffee shop, the library, where you can stall and read the paper, where you can get your caffeine fix and sit and stay there. Where you can browse the stacks and smell the books; you’re not supposed to talk much anyway so it’s safe there.

There is also the gym, if you’re shy, you can hang out with yourself and mirrors, you can put headphones in.

Then there’s public transportation, because we all gotta go places.

And there’s prayer and mediation, no one will think less if your hanging with your breath seeking peace and salvation.

Start simple. Things you may have previously avoided based on your avoid being alone principles.

The lunch counter, where you will be surrounded by “chow downers”, employees who only have an hour and their spouses work across town, and they, like you, will be alone.

Resist the urge to hang out with your cell phone.

When you are comfortable with “eat lunch and run”, take yourself out for dinner; a restaurant with linen and Silverware. You’re no less an intriguing a person when you are eating solo desert and cleaning the whip cream from the dish with your finger. In fact, some people at full tables will wish they were where you were.

Go to the movies. Where it’s dark and soothing, alone in your seat amidst a fleeting community.

And then take yourself out dancing, to a club where no one knows you, stand on the outside of the floor until the lights convince you more and more and the music shows you. Dance like no one’s watching because they’re probably not. And if they are, assume it is with best human intentions. The way bodies move genuinely to beats, is after-all, gorgeous and affecting. Dance until you’re sweating. And beads of perspiration remind you of life’s best things. Down your back, like a book of blessings.

Go to the woods alone, and the trees and squirrels will watch for you. Go to an unfamiliar city, roam the streets, they are always statues to talk to, and benches made for sitting gives strangers a shared existence if only for a minute, and these moments can be so uplifting and the conversation you get in by sitting alone on benches, might of never happened had you not been there by yourself.

Society is afraid of alone though. Like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements. Like people must have problems if after awhile nobody is dating them.

But lonely is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless, and lonely is healing if you make it.

You can stand swathed by groups and mobs or hands with your partner, look both further and farther in the endless quest for company.

But no one is in your head. And by the time you translate your thoughts an essence of them maybe lost or perhaps it is just kept. Perhaps in the interest of loving oneself, perhaps all those “sappy slogans” from pre-school over to high school groaning, we’re tokens for holding the lonely at bay.

Cause if you’re happy in your head, then solitude is blessed, and alone is okay.

It’s okay if no one believes like you, all experiences unique, no one has the same synapses, can’t think like you, for this be relived, keeps things interesting, life’s magic things in reach, and it doesn’t mean you aren’t connected, and the community is not present, just take the perspective you get from being one person in one head and feel the effects of it.

Take silence and respect it.

If you have an art that needs a practice, stop neglecting it, if your family doesn’t get you or a religious sect is not meant for you, don’t obsess about it.

You could be in an instant surrounded if you need it.

If your heart is bleeding, make the best of it.

There is heat in freezing, be a testament.

Long time, no post!

I've been getting ready for POC, going through POC, recovering from POC, preparing for my move, driving up to DC, doing more preparation for the move, and I move TOMORROW to Birmingham!

In the meantime, here is a video shot in Jacmel, Haiti, with after my rotation left. It's a series being pitched to Discovery, and it best answers the question, "How was Haiti?" In it, you will see Rod, Grace, Philip, Frank, Mika, and Junior, all of whom I met during my time there.

Explore22 - Episode 1 (Haiti) from Explore22 on Vimeo.

Some Benefits of Hunting and Gathering

(image courtesy of Watersense.)

In a medical anthropology class at Emory, I read Jared Diamond's essay The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, which I've been thinking about a lot ever since. Diamond argues that agriculture brought about an increase in the incidence of disease, as it encouraged crowding (which is obvious) and as it encouraged the consumption of diet that was sub-optimal from a nutritional standpoint, dependence on a few crops, which raised the risk of starvation (a rarity in modern hunter-gatherer societies), and paved the way for class- and sex-based discrimination.

The evidence is based on archaeological findings, as well as (less directly and admittedly with some conjecture) on anthropological studies of modern hunter-gathering societies, e.g. the Bushmen of the Kalahari.

'Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here’s one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn’t emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"

While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a bettter balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen’s average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It’s almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s.'

The essay can be found here, and is short and quite well-written. I had forgotten that George Armelagos, the Anthropology department chair for most of my time at Emory, was quoted in the essay, so that was a bonus!

I'm not advocating a sudden worldwide return to hunting and gathering; our planet's population is huge and grossly dependent, both nutritionally and economically, on the growing, buying, and selling of staple crops, such as rice. It does, however, make me wonder what would happen if I stopped eating rice, wheat, and other foods I would only find in agricultural societies, as my body, like that of all humans, is adapted for eating stuff I find or kill. I started looking into this with greater interest after running across Mark's Daily Apple, where Mark and his minions write about their modern "primal" lifestyle (which is, of course, closely related to the paleo diet, for those who have seen mention of that in recent years). This has led to my beginning to experiment more with cooking greens and baking with almond flour (the cookies were good, the bread is stellar, the pie was a disappointment) and I'm looking forward to trying and learning more; and who knows? Maybe I will see results.

Reflections on Haiti: A month later.

I’ve been home from Haiti for about a month now, and I have had a lot of time to reflect on my time there. I still haven’t completed my intended project of transcribing all of my written journal entries to the computer so I can shared edited portions. I have, however, come to a couple of conclusions:

I’m tired of hearing, “Oh, I wish I could do something like that!” I’m also tired of hearing that I’m a good person for going. It was pretty much pure “voluntourism”: let’s go somewhere exotic and poor and help out on our time off! Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great, as it gets work done and educates people about places that are radically different worlds from their own. I went because I needed to feel like I was doing something, I had time, and I had some money available to me. I am glad that I went, but I went for me, to satisfy this urge I had to do something. And anyone can do it, given some time and some money. Many volunteers use their vacation days to do this kind of work; many people who are between jobs take that time to volunteer.

I can’t go back. I thought I would; I wanted to go back, desperately, after I got home. I still wish I could go back. But my responsibilities to commitments at home, to my friends and families, to myself, as I move to a new city and begin graduate school: those stand in my path, in an immediate way. On a deeper level, however, there remains this conviction that anything I can give or do can’t be enough, that it’s like trying to desalinize an ocean with an eyedropper of fresh water. And it isn’t because Haiti needs so much (although it does) or because I feel that my efforts are meaningless (although there are days when it felt and still feels that way).

I feel that Haiti is ill, and its symptoms of poverty and corruption are the effects of psychological scarring left over from the days of slavery: after the rebellion that transformed it from Saint-Domingue to Haiti, it was forced to pay reparations back to France and the United States and rest of Europe refused to trade with it, out of fear of war with France. Like so many struggling former colonies, when it gained its freedom, it was like a teenager, with an idea of how adulthood should look, but with not enough experience to self-govern and achieve that maturity. I think that Haiti’s development has been so stunted economically and its dependence on foreign aid become so strong, that it may not ever gain safe footing, particularly if it continues in the same pattern it has been for years now.

That sounds cold and callous, doesn’t it? I don’t mean to sound so hopeless, so negative, and perhaps part of this is me trying to distance myself from Haiti. It is, however, based on my observations and the observations I have compared with many others, not only volunteers in my group, but friends who have worked there with the military or visited at other times. There’s a sense among many Haitians that I met that one must work hard- but only hard enough to make it to tomorrow. And then one repeats it the next day, every day, until one dies. Not all people, of course, subscribe to that philosophy, and I am not saying it is unrealistic in the conditions in which many Haitians have grown to adulthood. It is simply the way to make it through the day without going insane: its own protective insanity. Jessica Leeder a writer for The Globe and Mail living in Jacmel wrote that she had hired a housekeeper, who quit after day one, believing that she wouldn’t make more money that the 38 dollars Canadian that she stole from Leeder the first day.

Why invest in the future, though, if you live without the certainty that there will be a future for you at all? In my last journal entry, as we left Jacmel, I wrote that Haiti constantly undergoes crises that seem to undo the work previously completed. It’s a recurring cycle of renewal, but it isn’t healing. It only returns Haiti to square one, or even square zero. The cause of the setback can be anything- whether man-made or natural disaster- but the average Haitian seems equally powerless in contrast, no matter the cause, as they are economically (and therefore politically) disenfranchised, to the point that creating something permanent looks, at least to my Westernized eyes, to be a pipe dream.

Best way to sum up how I felt upon returning home.

From Philip Ngiau's journal:

"I ‘m on my way to Kennedy Space center…and i just keep thinking about something i read. It was about one of the first lunar astronauts, and how the first night back from the moon there was a BBQ in his backyard. There he stood, beer in hand, looking up at the moon. Nothing had changed around him, everything and everyone was the same…the only difference was that this time he had “the opposite point of view” he was having right now…standing on the moon looking up at earth, and to him, it made all the bbq’s before all feel a little different than the bbq’s after…i didnt really get it, but its been running thru my mind after entering that supermarket. I cant help but remember standing in Pinochiot camp, or just haiti in general. The size, the rows of food and much much more i could use or need…it felt surreal…like one or the other must be fake, these two “places” cant exisit in the same “good” world we live in right…it makes me “crunch” up my brow in a bewildered and slightly lost feeling at the difference…but that is why i had to go to haiti…every time before, it was just a CNN report on TV, and no matter how much i watched it, it remained something i…well, watched on TV. Now its not…"