Rough draft

Yesterday I fed my worms, and I watched them. They're doing good when there are a lot of little white squiggling worm babies and the grown ups are fat and dark pinkish red. There are no issues with overcrowding. I don't know how they do it, there are so many little white squiggling worm babies in there. I have a hunch about 1/3 of the compost at the bottom of my bin is decomposed worm carcasses.

I actually have a somewhat emotional reaction when I peek inside and see them crawling around my rotting food scraps. This is unbidden, I had to think about it to figure it out. That's nature at work, in that bin, that's why it makes me emotional. These little living things are working around the clock, eating, pooping, laying babies, eating some more, and at the end of it I have all the scraps from my food transformed into nitrogen fixing fertilizer. I'm part of it too, I make food and get the food scraps in there. I'm part of a closed loop, with those pinkish red writhing little living things. I really love that.

Who does not like knowing that on the other end of some expenditure of energy, in my case cooking, is a net gain because they have tapped into a process that magnanimously incorporates their every move into a virtuous cycle?

So this is what I'm thinking about as I prepare to write a paper about modern democracy.

Security

The other day, I was watching a science lesson in a first grade class of the private education corporation I work for. They were learning about the way animals modify their habitats for survival, using the beaver dam as an illustration.

So the teacher has dug a trench in potting soil in a plastic tub, and the kids have helped her make a popsicle stick and clay dam to simulate beaver activity and placed it in the middle of the trench. One of the kids tilts the bin slightly as she pours the water, and they squeal and moan as it flows right through the dam and pools on the wrong side of it.
“Oh no! It didn’t work? What would you do, if you were a beaver?”
Most of the class raises their hands. “Oooh, oooh, I know, I know!”
The girl she calls on says, “Edit it!”
“Edit it?”
“Yeah, like when you do your sentence wrong, you edit it, so beavers, if they do a dam wrong, they can edit it.”
Pause. “Riiiight. Right! Good!” We make impressed eye contact, trying not to laugh. “So how could a beaver edit his dam, or fix his dam?”

In another first grade classroom, the students were learning about Connecticut.
“Why would it be important for people in Connecticut that they live near a coast?”
“Ooh, ooh, ooh! I know, I know!”
“Because their economy! Because they- because if- because, for economy, they have fish!”
“Good! And what would fish be considered, if they can use them in their economy?”
“Resources! Fish is- fish are resources!”

Raise your hand if you could talk about resources when you were in first grade. Yeah. Change it is a'comin'.

Picture Tag

Tagged by Sum

I can't believe this was the picture.

This is my friend August's nephews, in Apuk Padoc in Southern Sudan. I used it in January last year to create a digital invitation to an information session about the NGO August and his cousin Gabe were starting to help develop the community there. August and Gabe grew up there; they're American citizens now, August is working on his PhD in sociology and Gabe is finishing his degree in accounting. The boys in this picture are still in Sudan, so we need to get those wells crackin'.

Sustainability

I just made butternut squash leek soup, courtesy of my community supported agriculture share from East Farms. I froze some of it. So...bring it on, Wall Street. :)

Meet the 405th CA Batallion

This is the Army unit I'm in now. They got back from Afghanistan in July 2007, and we've been training for the return deployment next summer since about, oh, July 2007. Some of them are reenlisting. Awesome, awesome people. Ideologically it's unsettling that the military is executing so much of our nation's foreign affairs, but given that that is the situation right now, I hope it helps to know who some of your ambassadors are.

A very good place to start

When I was in seventh grade, I wrote a memory narrative about the house I grew up in. It made it into the literary publication at the end of the year, but my English teacher told me that though it was well-written, it lacked depth.

I don't have it anymore, but it was something like this:

When my parents got married, they saved and saved and after about three years made three major purchases: a house, the grand piano that took up about 1/8 of its floorspace, and a giant chandalier that hung over the piano.

The piano took up most of the living room, but over the years it was joined by an organ, a synthesizer, and several giant speakers, one of which was in the fireplace. There was a couch and a chair too, so people had somewhere to sit to listen to the music.

The little backyard had a swing set, eight fruit trees, a strawberry patch until it died under our sleds one winter, and a vegetable garden. I ate store-bought canned goods for the first time a couple years after we moved and Mom's bottled stuff ran out.

In the narrative I continued to expound upon the ways that house had inspired me to be industrious and creative, and concluded that I was grateful for my blessings or something. I knew it lacked depth, but what else was there to say?

That year we watched Desert Storm on Channel One before first period. Anderson Cooper was one of the anchors. I think that was also the year some American kids got caned for keying cars in Singapore.

Some years later, I made friends with Sara Stinnett in choir. She had joined the Army between Junior and Senior year - so cool. We started jogging and doing push-ups together after school, and I found out I could be a journalist for the military. Basic training was in Texas and the journalism training school was in Maryland! I was going to take two plane rides, and I was going to go to the East Coast. To be a journalist. OMG hadn't been invented yet, but you get the idea.

In Texas a year later, at Lackland Air Force Base, I had done something, I can't remember what, that prompted our Basic Training Instructor to let me ask him any question I wanted during mail-call. I don't know if they still do this, but at the time, mail-call was a time when the TI could be less formal.

Contemplate as I might, the only thing I could think of asking was whether he played any musical instruments, but that would be weird, so I asked, "You seem like a nice guy. Why did you decide to be a TI?"

He was genuinely surprised, not in a pleased way- I remember the look on his face- but he quickly shouted, "Gale!"

Damn it. "Sergeant, Trainee Gale reports, what, Sergeant?"

"I let you ask any question you want and that's all you can come up with!"

I didn't reply because I didn't know what to say, I was so embarassed.

He shook his head and looked me in the eyes, but didn't say anything. Finally, after he was finished passing out all the mail and giving us the next day's schedule, he settled in his chair.

"How many of you think you'll never go to war?"

Of course none of us raised our hands.

"No, I'm serious. Okay, how many of you are thinking in your heads, 'I need to pay attention, I might be fighting next to these guys someday?' Any of you?"

I thought- well, hopefully we're not just learning how to fold a sports bra into a perfect square. But I kept my hand down.

"Some of you are going into security forces. Some of you are going into softer career fields- accounting, services. Journalism. I am not here to train accountants and cooks and journalists. I am here to train United States Airmen."

I can't remember what he said his career field had been when he was called up to Desert Storm, but he was not expecting that kind of war. He was also, he told us through clenched teeth before he started crying, not expecting to see his best friends killed right next to him. We were Airmen, we needed to remember that. That was why he became a TI.

That was actually the last time he talked with us; he got pulled to shape up an unravelling male flight a few days later.

I wrote home that night, to Summer, and I told her that I missed being able to just be with people I loved. I remember lying in my bed with tears pooling in my ears. I think that night I began to achieve depth.