FooDiary: Intro & DC Living

I will now be using this space to ALSO blog about my food experience, as it was a year of Investigations that led to my increased awareness of food and, thus, the forthcoming blogs themselves.

To begin, I have successfully completed my junior year and accepted an intern position to my local Member of the House of Representatives, moving to Washington D.C. in the process. I am living with my aunt and uncle for the duration; their house is located in a suburb of D.C., just inside the Beltway. I take the Metro to and from the Capitol City quite frequently; it's a 50 - 60 min. commute, and the last bus leaves the train station for home at 7:30. If I miss the bus, my alternatives are to call a cab (~$12 plus tip) or ask one of my relatives to pick me up...which I am loathe to do and have avoided thus far. I am not expected to pay rent, cook (often) or purchase my own food (though I do frequently anyway) or otherwise have any other obligations typically associated with owner-tenant relationships. Yes, I'm essentially free-loading; ain't family swell? Don't worry, this all factors into my experiences with food, as you'll see.

My obligations are thus. I work a 20-hour week; our office has three interns, retaining two in the office at any one time. One of the other interns is full time; I and the other are part time, due to a gaffe in my interview where I mentioned I "might look for another job while I'm here". I haven't been able to land a second job, and so my Congressional responsibilities are my only pressing ones. I work two full days and one half day. The other part-timer and I trade hours and days freely, so long as we have a mutual agreement that fits both of our schedules. I work from 9 - 5 p.m. on a full day; the tradeoff point for a half day is 1 p.m., leaving lunch entirely up in the air. The full-timer and I are both 21, and so we enjoy heading to a pub after work on Friday - especially payday. I'm still bound by my 7:30 deadline, but as long as I catch a train by 7, I usually make it on time.

Lunch on the job is allowed, but we're encouraged to hurry it up and get back to work. The staff members typically take lunch at their desks, and so are likely to be resentful of an extended intern lunch break. The rules are relaxed when Congress is not in session, as "the Boss" isn't around. Otherwise, our best (and most frequented) dining option is the Longworth building Congressional Cafeteria. It's set-up much like any of the other cafeterias in federal buildings, and is open to the public...if they can find it. A wide variety of foods are available here. Typically, staff members, interns, and tourists are the patrons of this establishment. Higher-level people attend lunchtime meetings, banquets, etc. and have no need for such banalities as a tray or waiting in line. I personally am bound by my checking account. My favorite option has thus become the $5 meal deal, where I can get a simple entree of the day, plus a 16 oz drink. Otherwise, meals are upwards of seven bucks, with drinks and sides costing extra. Stupid lousy federal cafeterias.

That's a basic outline of my "official" environment. Other posts will explore what I do on my days off, as well as particular food episodes.

Have a good summer everyone, and keep checking for updates! I'm not dead yet!
JV

Cradle to Cradle, Part One

So, everything I enjoy about my modern life is killing me softly? Not only me, but the rest of the planet as well. That's the impression that I get from reading the first two chapters of Cradle to Cradle. The authors, Braungart and McDounagh, seem to enjoy elaborating on just what it is in my lifestyle that's slowly eating me up. There's no way to make what I've read so far seem positive. I know that the Industrial Revolution led to our current way of life. However, there's no real reason to make it seem as if the first man to hook a waterwheel to a spinning jenny committed to a deal with the devil.

In addition, the book treats the eco-friendly movement like a child's 1st grade art project. You can almost hear the authors saying "Awww, that's cute." while silently judging the work to be completely idiotic, smug and satisfied in their beliefs. It's certainly easy enough to sit back, write a book, and wait for the change to occur, bleating all the while when your ideas aren't taken to heart. These guys even mention Carson's Silent Spring and notice that her ideas took decades to be put into effect; even longer to bear fruit. Not every book author that comes out with a "radical redesign of society" can enjoy that sort of success. Silent Spring's suggestions were not entirely odious and onerous to our society as a whole. Refitting every factory, every industry to wash out all the junk in the production process AND produce something that can be beneficial to another production process when THIS cycle of usefulness runs its course? First of all, good luck getting companies to agree to that. Second, who could afford something with that much overhead behind the price? The global economy would throw a fit, and we would likely have a war on our hands from the mind-boggling market crash.

I usually don't appreciate being bullied by scare tactics. Cradle to Cradle has not impressed much else upon me. I'm only one third of the way through the book, and I can feel myself saying already "Ugh, here we go again", thinking back to The World Without Us. Though the authors manage to keep their organization together, the same "our civilized way of life is actually the Boogeyman" approach starts to feel trite the second time around.

Seminar Journal 3

Where do we go from here?

Years of experience in the program have left me a little jaded. I'm not saying that I'm an expert in the ways of all things SMC: many of the particular tropes of the program still befuddle me into a stunned silence. However, I have been in enough seminars to feel that the selection process has become old hat. Then again, some of my favorite hats are the older ones, so we should give it another pass, yes?

I imagine that we'll veer away from something directly related to the previous book. This includes works by the same author. Frankly, I'm not as enamored with Weismann's writing style as I first was, so this would be a welcome change. In the past, we've trended towards topics that are only tangentially related to the previous work. This pattern of thought was likely an expression of a desire to cover more ground, rather than delving deeper into the current topic with a more focused work. The obvious themes that come out of "The World Without Us" are post-apocalyptic scenarios, human impact, and nature. There are also other topics and subtopics thereof, but those are the major themes that run through the course of the book.

Fortunately, these topics are well represented on Blackboard at the moment. We haven't had a formal vote, but a few of the suggestions have comments of approval. One of the things I think is odd about SMC (and a lot of peer communities that I've participated in) is the reluctance to offer criticism, especially of the constructive sort. Not that there are many ways to improve upon individual book selections without having a thorough command of knowledge pertaining to the subject and relevant books besides, but...it's something to think about, isn't it?

Personally, I support Where's My Jetpack? and Rats. These two books are divergent enough in topic to spark good debate between the two, while both subjects would hold my interest in equal measure. Plus, they are only tangentially related to The World Without Us! It's perfect! "Rats" discusses human impact without getting too weepy about the harm we're doing to the planet. I'm sorry, but I feel guilty enough about my American dependence on hamburgers, packaging, and cheap electricity. I would also like to read about unseen impacts that don't require a science degree to fully understand. Human society gives off enough detrius for many scavengers to survive, and one of the most persistent animals to congregate in human cities happens to be rats. "Pigeons" would also be an interesting book, but I digress. "Where's My Jetpack?" will satiate the little mad-scientist-that-never-was within my soul. Come on, a field guide to fantastic technology that not only may be possible, but some pieces of tech that are already in production? Please, sign me up. It's about the future, it's about human impact, and I'm sure we can steer it into an environmental discussion if we think that we're not being "green" enough. I personally do not care if we fail to consciously choose an eco-friendly topic or are not "conscientious caretakers" of our planet for one topic every now and again.

That's my rant. We'll see how the vote goes.

Technology and Warfare - Quick Thoughts

During my pursuit of a research process for my History research course, I stumbled across some interesting articles concerning Nazi superweapons during the Second World War. I'm talking about ridiculously large tanks, super submarines, and attachments to your semiautomatic rifle that let you shoot around corners. I'm serious, people.
http://i.somethingawful.com/inserts/news/images/03-2003/03-03-2003-stg2.jpg
In any event, war has played an important role in the evolution of technology. An awful lot of peaceable inventions and tech in general has come from humans thinking of better ways to wipe out other humans. For example, look at radar. Radar was developed as a tool to warn of incoming enemy bombers. Now we use it to manage the massive commercial airline industry and cut travel times dramatically without planes flying into one another during the middle of the night. Everything that came out of the Space Race - microwaves, dehydrated food, silicon chips, smaller and more affordable computers - came about simply because we were obsessed with beating the Russkies into space. We thought that was the last great frontier, and damned if the Reds were going to use it against us. It was certainly a war-time effort.

This may be why I find the late 19th century and early 20th century so fascinating in terms of technology. Those were relatively peaceful years, considering what had come before and what had yet to come. With no mass-murder on the mind, what drove those inventors to create? What gave them the idea to run electricity through a particular elemental metal? Why on earth would man want to fly? Who the hell invented the parachute, and who DARED to test it?

Seminar - Second Entry

If you're here looking for my technology blog, it'll be up shortly.

In the meantime, I finished the book "The World Without Us". My earlier fears of Weisman taking an anti-human tack were, thankfully, misplaced. He reconciles his utopian ideas of what a paradise Earth would be (save for those meddling humans!) and his sudden realization that his dream scenario is completely implausible. Not impossible, just implausible. He begins to veer toward offering a solution to the number of problems outlined in the book, but stops just short of sounding a call to action.

As someone doomed to be a landlubber for much of his life, I am happy to get a glimpse of what goes on beneath the waves of the ocean. After all, it's not often that I read about a part of Earth that is still literally teeming with life, such as Kingman Reef. Is anyone worried that people like me will want to visit the places described in the book, if only for a chance to glimpse what the author is attempting to convey to us? These Lost Edens could become overrun by armchair vacationers who want to get off the couch and go see it for themselves. Then where would those lovely schools - SCHOOLS - of shark go? That's not to mention the horrendous damage to the Reef itself from big-bottomed tourist boats grinding against them in order to deposit chubby men into the pristine water.

Let's talk about the coda, for a moment.
The coda to the book serves as a way to bring all the disparate chapters together with a few final questions. Interestingly, Weisman invokes the religious idea of an afterlife. What would happen to the Earth if we were suddenly raptured away, and the many apocalypses occurred? Oddly, the Ragnaroks of the religions of the world hardly mention the Earth at all. It seems that the human race was too selfish to give a thought to the planet that birthed them and bore them. We were - and still are, mind you - only mindful of where WE are going, what WE are going to be doing.

That's perhaps what made this book so fascinating. It was an unabashed look into a world without us, a world that would (haha) have to survive without us somehow. In most instances, it would appear to do quite well. It's true that humans spend a great deal of time beating back nature's advances on our achievements. Think of mildew, mold, and even a summer thunderstorm. Every day Mother Earth takes another potshot at our fragile achievements, and we fight back with all the science we have at our disposal. What if, Weisman muses, we were to stop fighting?

Weisman's other interesting proposal, enforced reproductive limitations, would solve the human problem without the terrifying idea put forth by the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. Rather than simply not having any more children at all, Weisman suggests that a worldwide ban go into effect on fertile women having more than one child. This would lessen our impact on the world over time, with only a moderate adjustment in society. Hell, the kids would be better off for it. No sibling rivalry, all the attention from Mom and Dad, all the money...ah, but...now that I think about it, no more siblings. I would certainly miss the bond and camraderie that my brothers and I share. There would have to be many tradeoffs, indeed...

Still, our population would drop dramatically by the turn of the 22nd century, enough to warrant a sequel to Weisman's original thought experiment. What would happen if world population fell to one billion in one hundred years? Cities would be abandoned, yet we humans would still be around to deal with the consequences of such a decline in our world population. Would one billion be enough to maintain the current infrastructure? Unlikely. We would have to scale back, but would we bother? Perhaps it would be better to let it decay; certainly easier, but what would happen to...

*sigh* I could go on all night. You might say that I could fill a book with wonderful "what-ifs", and make a killing.

Seminar Entry 1

I remember reading a brief review of "The World Without Us" and consequently nearly purchasing it at the local bookstore in my freshman year of college. Alas, my checking account did not agree with that idea, and the idea, along with the book were forgotten.

Imagine my surprise when I was able to rediscover the book in my seminar class this fall semester. I took a shine to Alan Weisman's fanciful extrapolations of a future world, and found no trouble in believing the nigh-impossible circumstances surrounding his premise. What if, he posits, humanity were to (magically) vanish permanently from the surface of the earth in the very near future? Several of my classmates may have found that difficult to believe, but the reasons behind the book's exploration of a future without us do not really matter, and are trivial in comparison to the ideas unleashed in the book. Suspend your disbelief, reader, and free yourself from the binds of rational thought for as long as you hold the book open.

I have read nearly three quarters of the book as I write this. I have not really found any particular threads binding the seperate chapters in each part together. This is slightly depressing, as I had hoped the seperation of parts would serve some purpose (aside from a convienient way to split up readings for, say, a 100 level college seminar) of organization. Otherwise, the topics explored in the book seem scattershot; for example, the chapter on birds directly proceeds the chapter on radioactive waste. If there is a greater organizational theme surrounding the book, then it is too subtle for me, the average Joe.

The ideas explored in the book are all well thought out and researched. Weismann has sought out experts (or the nearest fascimille) concerning each chapters topic, and seems to have probed them extensively concerning our current arrangements. He presents how the world currently researches in easy-to-understand language, sprinkled throughout with snatches of wit or wry observations on human nature. He seems to have followed each interview with "Now, suppose there were no more humans..." The experts gamely explore the idea with Weismann, noting the gradual (or sudden, depending on scale) destruction of all humanity has achieved. He also notes our lingering legacy, if any, that pertains to the topic at hand.

Weismann does seem to go out of his way to portray humanity as earth's greatest villains and devils. There is always something wrong with the way we've handled things, despite the fact that humans are large and the planet's dominant species. While it's true that we have not always been the perfect caretakers of the planet, Weismann will often explore peculiar legacies of humanity's time on the planet, such as the effect of cell phone towers on large populations of birds. If every decision humankind has made rested on taking every possible factor into account, the decision and debate process would consume a span greater than most lifetimes. In short, nothing would get done.

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I realize that this blog entry has read like a book report or middling review. However, I do think that there is more to be had from this book, and I am withholding a final judgement until I read the final part of "The World Without Us".

Intitial Impressions

Another year, another Investigations ship has sailed. I'll refrain from talking about the captain of this vessel, as well as my fellow crew members, until it becomes relevant.

I've chosen to investigate technology this year, as a way of appeasing the little mad scientist in me. I fear that my research will trend toward the more historical side of things, like many of my other projects. This may be in deference to my increased focus on my (history) major this semester, or it may only be a reflection of how my brain works. Regardless, with an umbrella topic with a historical date in it (20th Century...!), the temptation is almost too much.

To begin, I've checked out three books from the library. Each focuses on a specific aspect of technology, and serves as a jumping off point. I can't bring myself to look at everything that has to do with technology, so I'm going to have to cut down my field of vision, so to speak.

Now...where did I put that list...of titles and authors...and....damnit all......

Never mind that. I'll post that critical info in a later post...or not at all. If I figure out which direction I wish to take this runaway train of thought before my next post, then there should be no need to display which directions that it could have gone off the rails.

Currently, I'm reading a book entitled "Dominance By Design", an examination on the effect American technological developments have had on its current position within the world. I'm interested in this angle primarily due to my investment in realistic fiction. Many authors of near-future science fiction tales have Americans (or their fictional analogues) placed atop the technological hierarchy. It does seem to be true that American technology reigns supreme in the current world. However, I suspect that my current viewpoint results from my American history textbooks self-aggrandizing nature more than as a point of fact. Perhaps current advancements in technology can be attributed to American research, but as for the actual parts? Those come from the lowest bidder, these days.

That leads me to another interesting, crucial point. What precisely do I mean when I say "technology"? Am I talking about actual, physical pieces of tech? Or, as "Dominance By Design" alludes to, is that word a reflection upon an actual knowledge that exceeds a current standard? I will post my working definition when I have more than a swirl of thoughts.

Finally, I ought to mention that Capt. Steve Goldman has shown a particular interest in my topic, and has offered his assistance, as well as a short list of contacts to help with my project. I feel...special, yet undeserving at the same time. Until I have a better idea to work with, I'm not quite sure what I would do with any help offered.