Birth Pains of Astral Projection

“If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.”― Albert Camus, The Rebel In 2001, I saw God, which is to say, I saw nothing. I was depressed about everything. Leaving the bubble to enter college- even though I thought I was open-minded - the deluge of responsibilities and possibilities for the rest of my foreseeable future hit me like a fucking brick wall.

Emotionally spent and at the point of literally laying down to die, I stuck myself in a closet, completely vision-denied. Pink Floyd’s “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” worked as a mantra. Ritualistic phrases and orthodox adherence to a set mantra and style of meditation had not yielded results for me at that point, but the music allowed me to fixate enough on something else (actually depriving my sense of hearing of any intrusions) to let the mind wander inward. I saw nothing but darkness. And still I saw potential - the becoming. Coming out of my state, I laughed at how absolutely absurd life is. Everything we do or say we live for. Fabrications upon fabrications. We are nothing, and in that, everything. 

The days - nearly two decades - since that experience have been a continual struggle in some ways. It’s a trouble I chose though, once I was able to fully comprehend the gravity of non-being. I totally understand the evangelical mindset because I feel saved too. In my case, saved of any hope there’s some answer out there at all. Or perhaps the answer is completely irrelevant because it’ll never be confirmed by some official authority or understandable to me. It’s a faith in the unknowing. An acceptance of complete lack of control.

That realization made me simpler in some way. There’s a connection with the very nature of my existence that I cannot sever. The nature of my reality revealed itself to me in a wholly physical realm. So unlike the evangelicals, I believe the soul is the fleeting aspect. The body is the eternal, as it recycles into billions upon billions of atoms and reforms in myriad fashion. Stardust - algae - ferns - trees- ammonites - trilobites - and so on and so on all the way to - humans. The ego can’t bear to reconcile this fact. Everything about our society reinforces our tendency to want to escape our impermanence. However, once you see through the veil, it’s a game changer, and a relief.

Anarchism of the Soul

"Before his eyes in sudden view appear
The secrets of the hoary Deep - a dark
Illimitable ocean, without bound,
Without dimension...." - John Milton, Paradise Lost

I’m a virgo. Your eyes just rolled. It’s fine. I roll my eyes when someone tells me their star sign too. How bizarre to think the solar/planet alignment, time, season of your gestation and date/time of your initial entry into this world has any effect on how your genes express themselves or what your personality will be like. There's something about astrology that I can't dismiss entirely though -a systematized understanding of ourselves in a time before enough technological advances existed to deeply answer those questions of why we exist and are the way that we are. Religion is an example of that as well, when discussing the mysticism aspect of any faith. The hardcore adherence to orthodoxy is too clean cut, too much like an assembly guide to ever appeal to me. Not to say no rules, total chaos is key, Because that is a poor response to the question of why we're here too. It's lazy in a different way from following a litany of rules and checking endless boxes toward success - that isn't life as much as it is a really by-the-book sheet cake.

Personally, I’m not an anti-free will kinda gal, but the lengths to which the believers of human exceptionalism chalk any of our species’ advancements up to our own stolid self-determination and autonomy is directly proportional to the degree to which they’re a tool. We have free will, or at least the perception of having free will enough to concede that everything is not wholly deterministic. However, there are so many variables in the environment around us. It’s not so out of this world to believe that maybe celestial forces, even large scale, can somehow impact individual beings. Humans can explain a lot about the natural world, and in great detail. Unfortunately, even our most detailed responses to the metaphysical questions of 'why?' fall short. As an atheist, I find it amusing when I come to such seemingly un-atheistic conclusions. What I am objecting to in most religious dogma is the simplification and anthropocentric conceptions of the unknown. I detest an explanation that is specifically packaged to "make sense to me" as a human. The world/universe does not make sense in any widely understandable way that humans could ever be expected to grasp. That does not mean curiosity should be quashed and explanations not pursued. It does mean that spending a lot of time building up the rules of engagement based on those discoveries only serve to oppress and confuse.

For a long time, probably a good decade, I lived in a space of being a simulation of myself. A projection of what I wanted to be seen as out in the world. It affected choices I made on very personal levels. Throughout high school, I spent a lot of time by myself because it was easier than pretending to be something I was not. And even though authenticity has always been a core value, there’s something that was inauthentic in me from ages 19 to about 30. The obsession to be in control over all aspects of my life made it difficult for me to recognize my own self worth, which was inclusive of imperfections that were interpreted as fatal flaws, making me unworthy of love. It led me down roads of controlling my weight to unhealthy extremes, making “rational” choices over intuitive ones and leaving me, at 37, wondering what the fuck I was thinking. After having a child and just learning to accept myself more readily, my life has felt fuller and more meaningful. Yes, because of her presence in this world as a little being making her way, but also due to the immediate connection with the more animalistic nature of one’s self that was laid bare during pregnancy and childbirth itself. There’s no pulling punches that you’re an animal in the throes of childbirth. Control floats away - there’s less ability to keep up the facade of human society. Through trial and error I have come to see there's a beauty in putting oneself out there. A beauty that is missing when one never moves beyond the tight, controlled circle. Hermetically sealed perfection isn't life in the end. It's a performative exercise that limits human capacity for creativity and an understanding of truth.

Ultimately, I have begun to advocate for an anarchism of the soul. Such a belief would allow for exploration of our "selves" as both an individual and a species. Self-discovery, self-empowerment and trust in the intuitive core of the self would come to be essential to life. As an acolyte of soul-anarchism, one would need to balance utilizing the abilities and skills within us to express what it is to be human. We have become so enamored with the capacity of our own minds to create and expand our boundaries that we're literally killing our planet to prove how advanced we are; not to mention the hubris we have to think we can bring our planet back from the brink. There is no "bringing it back" because we don't actually have control over forces way larger than ourselves. The most we can hope for is the ability to experience the now that is here for us, but within that, to realize that if we act solely with hedonistic, narcissistic abandon, we actually work against our own survival. 

Born.Live.Die.Signify.

“I have had an intense and highly aesthetic perception of what I call the icy bleakness of things. At the same time I have felt a great loneliness in this perception. This conjunction of feelings seems paradoxical, since such a perception, such a view of things, would seem to preclude the emotion of loneliness, or any sense of a killing sadness, as I think of it.” - Thomas Ligotti, The Bungalow House

“But I didn’t despise the Christian girls. No, for some strange reason it was precisely them I fell for. How could I explain that to Hilde? And although I, like her, always tried to see beneath the surface, on the basis of a fundamental yet unstated tenet that what lay beneath was the truth or the reality, and, like her, always sought meaning, even if it were only to be found in an acknowledgment of meaninglessness, it was actually on the glittering and alluring surface that I wanted to live, and the chalice of meaninglessness I wanted to drain – in short I was attracted by all the town’s discos and nightspots, where I wanted nothing more than to drink myself senseless and stagger around chasing girls I could fuck, or at least make out with. How could I explain that to Hilde? I couldn’t, and I didn’t. Instead I opened a new subdivision in my life. ‘Booze and hopes of fornication’ it was called, and it was right next to ‘insight and sincerity,’ separated only by a minor garden-fence-like change of personality.”

― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 4

In the short horror story, The Bungalow House by nihilist writer Thomas Ligotti, a narrator becomes obsessed with tape recordings of dream monologues he encounters in a dusty, disordered art gallery near his place of work. During one of his daily lunch breaks in the gallery, he comes across a new performance art exhibit – an audio cassette recording by an unnamed artist recounting his experience in an old, vermin-infested bungalow. The monologue is impactful as much for its silence as its words, and the narrator-listener becomes entranced by the recording, so much so that he implores the shop owner for the right to purchase it. After listening to the mysterious artist's second recording about an abandoned factory, the narrator desires a meeting with the artist. From there, the horror, almost wholly psychological, unfolds for the reader in a Borgesian style, leaving you with little to hold on to as “truth” by the end.

Psychological horror as a genre has intrigued me since I first read Kafka in high school. What untold damage we do to ourselves through tortuous, endless thoughts! And while I would love to get into the state of mental states at some later date, what struck me while reading this story was the beautifully nihilistic view of the material world – that icy bleakness of things. We imbue such life into our possessions by projecting a meaning onto them that is not inherently there. To that point, I think about the tub of stuffed animals sitting in my shed and get unnerved when I consider throwing them out. I am sure I could find a place to donate them, but some are likely too ratty and outdated to be relevant to any child today. And as to the bleakness of things, I think about how I foisted such emotional meaning into something so lifeless as a stuffed piece of fabric that even now, 30 plus years later, I can’t bear to think about them mouldering in a landfill somewhere, despite their once great significance being cut off to my adult self.

The bleakness of things comes from the ultimate realization that the hopes you have for said things will never be fulfilled - they are, in the end, just things. Beautiful things, expensive things, cuddly things - all just things. Once you realize their limitations, you have to accept that acquiring more, or different, things will never fulfill you. Ever.  Imagine the ennui of a spoiled child opening a 40th present at their over-the-top birthday party -  everyone blames the kid for being ungrateful, but the entire scene should be readily viewed as absurd. Yet somehow, it’s not. It’s like blaming the victim in a sense. “Oh, you don’t get happiness from things? Well, what does that say about the rest of us; are we all LYING to ourselves?” Yes, Brenda, you are all lying to yourselves. Now go have sex with the pool boy and calm down. Things don’t bring happiness -  a tautological thought for sure, but hell, Americans needed a show to teach them this!

Despite their inherent meaninglessness, the “things” that surround us do have an innate beauty. Even, or maybe especially, the discarded and forgotten things. There’s a morbid curiosity I have about the amount of stuff that’s created for human material consumption that goes unused - I am talking about the literal millions of tons of unsold products that end up...in landfills? In stores in developing nations? At the bottom of the ocean? The decay of things. Sensitivity to the death of things. It’s beautiful, in a twisted way.

For the past year or so, I have been reading the six volume novel, Min Kamp by Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard. When I tell “people who read” what I am reading, they laugh or roll their eyes, ask me how I can be reading such a series, because essentially it is about nothing. And in that nothing, it is about the everything of life. He spends passages, even pages describing his surroundings, from the natural to the material to the corporeal. And for what? In the end, he’s living his life as a normal person suffering through the mundanities of housework and childcare, the tedium of monogamy and the frustrations of being a (generally) domesticated animal that doesn’t rape and pillage its neighborhood. Same as most of us do on a daily basis. But there’s an elegance to the nothingness. An allure of the void. You’re reading about the life of a man who’s dissecting art history for three pages and then follows up that intellectual goodness with him checking out the cashier in a grocery store and anguishing over the guilt he feels because he’s married and his wife would kill him if she knew any of his innermost thoughts. For someone who spends a lot of time in their own head with their innermost thoughts (very much so by nature and at this point, by choice), this sort of juxtaposition makes complete sense. In moments of metacognition, I will catch myself listening to what someone is telling me about history curricula or whatever seemingly important stuff, but I will be more actively thinking about how old they look today or some other awful bullshit. My thoughts in those moments are unfiltered and wholly without judgment; if I can tune into that frequency though it’s amazing to realize just how aware we really are of the world around us. But, I guess due to “living our lives” we tune out a lot of the excess observational shit we do almost nonstop.

Sometimes I revel in that aspect of being human - how, as animals, we do have to be aware of our surroundings at all times. We’re lulled into this sense of complacency about it, or consider it “beneath us,” because we’ve built our societies one upon the other for so long, we seemingly are removed from that animalistic part of ourselves. If you’re an American and you’ve ever been to Rome or some other ancient city, it’s jarring to see the ruins of past civilizations just sticking out of the ground. It’s a constant reminder of the death of all civilizations, even great ones (ones whose legacy will extend beyond the cultural landscape of a hut that sells pizza). Partially decayed, totally void of usefulness to current humans...oh wait, what? Were our societies just things like my stuffed animals of yore? What a humbling realization. An understanding that you’re part of a never-ending cycle of consciousness. Lather, rinse, repeat.

So why read such stories? Their appeal lies in that bleakness - someone has made art out of just a life- a life like any other; a life like my own. Life as art. Life is art. Mortality as holding a beauty all its own - something that all those trope blasé vampires yearn for. We should enjoy to live life, or at least endure living it to see what sort of product is wrought by its end. Although we can argue about the actuality of “free will,” the perception most of us have about the lives we live is that we do have a degree of control over our choices. Perhaps there’s a guiding hand of a god or some genetic programming that pushes us in certain directions, but evolutionarily, our experience of consciousness is one of freedom.

As Camus supposedly opined, “Should I kill myself, or have another cup of coffee,” coffee always wins out because the death part can come without you ever guiding it toward truth.

Maybe It's OK to be Neurotic...?

“The agnostic, the skeptic, is neurotic, but this does not imply a false philosophy; it implies the discovery of facts to which he does not know how to adapt himself. The intellectual who tries to escape from neurosis by escaping from the facts is merely acting on the principle that “where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.” - Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

Recently, I revisited Alan Watts through a series of Youtube videos and his book, The Wisdom of Insecurity. A point he makes and often circles back to is that we came from nothing- non-consciousness - before we were born, as we will return to such a state when we die. We had no anxiety about the nonconsciousness of pre-birth, so we should, logically, consider a similar state of calmness when broaching the subject of our death as well. There's nothing to "fear" as you didn't fear "being" into existence. How perfect an idea; though I am still filled with trepidation when I contemplate my own death, as I worry what others will experience. Therein lies the real rub for me - I get death. I don't want to die right now, but I also don't fear dying. The fear and anxiety I feel is more related to thinking about what those close to me would experience. Lack. 

Although I've never considered myself a neurotic person, I definitely have gravitated and empathized, and, in cases, even been enamored with neurotics (it began with Woody Allen in my teens, yes, I know...THAT Woody Allen...and continued through to pretty much every character Michael Cera has embodied on the screen). Someone so filled with self-loathing from being a flawed human that even though they comprehend the "big picture," they're often so focused on the micro-perspective that they become wrapped up in the inanity of the mundane. Pretty much every episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" portrays this perspective. Larry is everyone's superego, but he's such a fundamentally flawed specimen, that the audience nearly always roots against him, whether or not they agree with him on principle. I'm sure the real Larry David isn't as abrasively awful, but his insights into our psychology as humans yields such levity and catharsis that, to me, it must be a sign of acceptance with himself and his own humanity. 

Constantly, I strive for that degree of acceptance with the world around me, those who inhabit it, and most importantly, my own self. But since expectations, desires and reality seldom coincide, I am thrown into the camp of the neurotic more often than I'd like. My thoughts are numerous and hectic - new worries bubble up constantly. However, I can't live in that place of constant fear, so I consider myself a visitor to neurosis and definitely feel a connection to those who do live there. I've experienced anxiety about grades, weight, relationships, job performance - anything evaluative or comparative, so you know, everything (ha!). Then I had a child and dropped out of the normal rat race for a while. No performative measures because, gladly, I could largely avoid them and also chose not to engage or pursue them. Competitiveness dropped away, Liberation from the bullshit, even if only for a short window of time, totally wiped away years of furrows. 

Sure, I'd had breakthrough moments previously, but carrying life and doing something so commonplace, and yet unique, was transformative to my worldview. After years of judging myself for performative acts, there was room to breathe and "be." Abject sadness that life was a simple as it possibly was when breastfeeding a child I had just birthed flooded me. How complicated our modern lives are! And complicated doesn't mean better. That was the real rub. That's what provoked the tears. We did this to ourselves - built layers atop layers. Nothing that we have added to the biological drives really amounted to anything more than just that -complexity. It's like bureaucracy - there's a sense to the system, sure, but the complicatedness of such a system serves nothing more than its own interests. If that system didn't exist, life might be more inconvenient in some sense, but life is life. Inconvenience is a part of life. Knowing such feelings as waiting, boredom, and even ennui, can in themselves be transformative for the human mind. Creativity flows 

The entirety of the human condition is one that provokes neurosis in all of us if we dwell on it for too long. So we sort of have to shed a tear for what we will ultimately lose and what we've already left behind, and own our feelings, good and bad. 

Craft Your Life In Ways It Will Be Shown

"Craft:  a form of knowledge, but not just knowledge of making, but a knowledge of being."*

Reading a book review of a history of crafts - in the sense of handicrafts or practical arts as well as time-worn, but increasingly rare practices, like sheep-herding - I was reminded of my obsession with the idea that teaching falls under this umbrella. For people who always felt teaching was the job that made sense to them, despite lower salaries or life in the panopticon (in which bureaucrats and your neighbors alike could have an opinion about YOUR job!), the common refrain that 'it's a calling' likely resonated with you, even if you rolled your eyes to the sentimental cheesiness so many would imbue such a statement with.

As I've expressed beliefs about the craft of teaching previously, the focus of this post is the concept of "craft" itself. In an era of instant gratification, the thought of putting time into such mundane tasks as weaving a basket or even chopping vegetables becomes ludicrous in the face of time savers like purchasing "pre-made," "pre-packaged," "pre-cut," etc. Yet, in light of all of our innovative ways to save a few minutes her and there, major consequences arise: the impact of the "use and toss" culture on our environment, the fact that no one seems to have achieved any long-term contentment, and the effect not engaging has on our minds.

Did our ancestors have more fulfilling material and spiritual lives? In some respects, yes....(?!). There was more likely to be a purpose to life, especially when it came to work. Crafting was life for a weaver, a shepherd, a potter. Of course, infant mortality rates were through the roof and a drink of water might lead to death. It's dangerous to romanticize the old and remove these practices from the societies in which they existed. That doesn't mean we can't find something to take away from them either.

In a post-industrialized world, where most hold service jobs, and even those who still work in manufacturing now have an idea their jobs come with an expiration date after which their positions will be automated, humans have to be cognizant of the limitations of the all-tech, all-the-time milieu. Our biological evolution has not caught up with our social. Human bodies have remained relatively unchanged as far as composition since 300,000 years ago. We tend to forget such realities when our species has woven a wonderfully progress-oriented narrative for ourselves in the form of a collective consciousness. And with a focus on the future (and a "now is better than then" attitude) we've lost sight of what it means to experience our humanness in many ways.

Must we, as individuals, craft to survive as a species? We're made to believe so many aspects of our society are "bedrocks" of civilization as we know it when likely they're not. Beliefs that take away our desires to "do," as in experience, the world around us. Instead we sit in inertia, rather than endure hard feelings. The fear of change and anxiety associated with non-conformity to a "normal" way of life keep us in jobs, homes, relationships, behavior patterns that rob us of our (admittedly, very little) agency to effect change in our own lives.

The only answer that satiates any desire for a solution (though it is paltry in comparison to the size of the problems facing our species) is to live , in the face of oppressive bourgeois norms, blasphemously. Whatever that word conjures up in your mind - try it out. The repression of our selves in learned from myriad sources and from an early age. Parental examples, religion, schooling, media and popular culture all send messages to continue the narrative, to preserve it for future generations. And sure, the levels of oppressive social messaging today are less restrictive and more open to new possibilities, but always it's a new amendment added to a list of many others versus. Rather, those new iterations can be intertwined into a wider web of human possibilities, furthering chances of a new configuration.

Thus, our nature calls us to craft - and not solely in the sense of gluing popsicle sticks together to make a frame. "Craft" in the older sense of the word - to know how to "be" whatever it is you're doing. Enrich your experience and life with full engagement in an activity.



*the review of the book, "Craeft" in the NYT Book Review

Death is OK, really.

Recently, two articles in the New York Times stood out to me - both relating ot the topic of death. The first appeared in the Sunday magazine - an article about a "transhuman" presidential candidate, Zoltan Istvan, whose major impetus (as there was no chance he'd be elected) was to raise awareness of his personal strides toward ending death. This piece was one in a line of many I have read recently in various publications regarding increasing human longevity beyond anything ever previously believed to be possible. As medical science and technology progress, doctors have been able to elongate their patients' lives by years, if not decades. Yet, despite these gains, the candidate and his followers believe strongly that death has become an inevitability only because we've been taught it's the endpoint, not that it actually is. As a transhumanist, Istvan is interested in wedding human longevity with technology. The author, who traveled with the candidate, seemed skeptical of the overall messaging, though intrigued by which camp - the people who accept death, or those who don't - as the ones who are really the ones deluding themselves.

One of Istvan's followers referred to those who accept death as the finality as  "deathists" who have the view that death isn't so bad or is "natural" because they're trying to convince themselves to accept death, when, in fact, they should be breaking free to realize their full potentials as ever-living beings. This wouldn't be my description of my thoughts regarding the matter. Not that I want to die right now, but over the years I have cultivated an acceptance of the realities of a mortal body. There's nothing in observable nature that would make me think there IS another option besides death. I don't believe in god(s) or any sort of higher, supernatural power. What we cannot explain boils down to what we either cannot - or choose not - to understand.

The idea of living forever cheapens the experience. If you only get one go around, you have to be more careful. You have to pay attention to the details. Living in the now is essential. Yet, this doesn't jive well with modern life, where everything is rapidly changing and we're always looking for the next best thing. So why are we obsessed and further falling into this mode of being? A lack of knowledge about death as a part of life. Strangely, it took getting and being pregnant for me to fully understand how little practical information about my own body was passed on to me through general education. In fact, I spent the first half of my pregnancy in a state of shock because everything I thought I knew was only partly correct. Instead of continuing to be surprised or enraged, I began reading as much as I could on the process from the points of view of doctors, doulas, midwives and other moms. This empowered me to be able to go about the rest of the pregnancy with less anxiety.

The second article focused on just that - the importance of teaching students about death from a clinical (and practical) standpoint. What is your body experiencing in this stage? The author, a doctor who specializes in both critical and palliative care, focuses on not only empowering her students through knowledge of the process of dying, but also in how to reach out to those in their lives who might be suffering. Much like sex education, which she also teaches, death education has become, for her, an essential plank in the k-12 education platform. And yet, unfortunately, also like sex ed, it has become relegated to something that many Americans think should either be taught by a child's parents or spiritual leaders. The end result is we have a lot of people walking around with no clue of what their body is capable of. As a history teacher, I've had students interrupt my class with questions like, "what IS a placenta?" because they left health or biology with insufficient answers. How they decided these questions were OK for history class is beyond me, but it probably has something to do with the fact that I will answer most of their questions.

To put it simply, the body, your body, is the only one you will have in this life. And as we spend upwards of 10 hours a day on "screen time" the idea that your body is limited seems, well, antiquated. The reality is that our analog brains (and fragile egos) cannot comprehend that our digital profiles are only avatars in a illusory world. Human consciousness and "flesh-embodiment" isn't privileged, it isn't prestigious, it's simply a function of the biological world in which we all exist. And to the question of whether we should then strive to completely transcend this biology through science does not sway me to resoundingly say, "Yes, let's!" because it puts too much faith in the nebulous concepts of "science" and "technology" for me. As an atheist religiously, I find that this lack of belief I have in gods also inevitably transfers to all things that require a hard-line faith. So, I return to the observable. the cycles of life I see around me in nature and say, "death is OK, really."

What's so funny about peace, love and understanding?

This weekend was an impromptu 4 day one due to 2 snow days in a row at the tail end of the week. While it was nice to be off, on Thursday I noticed that one of my guinea pigs was refusing solid food. This is a bad sign in an animal whose entire purpose in life seems to be to eat and poop. Since I was waaaay snowed in on Thursday, I had to improvise by blending up some veggies and hay pellets and trying to hand-feed her. She was mildly receptive, but not really gobbling it up. On Friday I was able to order special food from Amazon for one day shipping and went and got some baby food to hand-feed with in the interim. The food never arrived on Saturday (and I had to actually call Amazon this morning for a refund). She is on the special food now (I found it at a small, local pet store that I forgot existed until today). I don't know if she will make it through this time - once guinea pigs stop eating solid food, it's kind of a bad sign/sign of the end. 

Vets don't seem to know what to do with these little guys either. The last one I had that needed medical care spent 2 scary nights alone at the vet where they shaved his teeth down (which I don't even think was the problem - they just wanted to charge me $2000) and died as soon as I brought him home (heart attack). So I don't really want to put her through the same stressors so either she will gert better or die naturally at home. 

But after the many trials and tribulations of trying to feed a tiny mammal out of an even tinier syringe, I am tired. But also thoughtful.  I have had 4 rescue guinea pigs and 1 store-bought pig. The store bought one died after a year (so sad). The rescue pigs have been heartier, though I don't know from where they originate. The 2 girls I have now are both around 5 or 6 years old. They are cute and friendly and just kind of hang out all day. There's not too much to interact with as they do not have the intellect of a dog or cat, but they are cuddly. On Friday night, after hand-feeding Twinkie, I sat in front of the heater in my bedroom with her on my lap and just cried. Here I was, on a Friday night, sitting in my robe, on the floor in the bedroom, crying my eyes out over a mammal with the life span of maybe 8 years. But I just couldn't help it. Whenever animals or babies are sick, I become a wreck of a human. I just start weeping for every little life out there. As she sat on my lap, I could hear her heartbeat and I watched as she looked around, but sat contentedly without moving. I thought that maybe I could have done more in the time that I had her - taken her out every single day, given her better treats, just been there to do more. But I can't because I work, and I have to keep on truckin' every day, even if that means not always being able to do what I would really like to do all of the time.

That led me to think about what we prioritize in society. Do we prioritize caring for the pets and the people in our lives? I mean, I think the average person would say they personally do, but I don't think our culture does. In fact, I would argue that our system is set up to do the opposite - move on, buy something new, trudge forward no matter what. The elderly are so quaint, with their reminiscing, but come on grandma, just die already so we can bulldoze your house. I mean, sure it's not as disturbing
as that, but I am sure as you read that line, you smirked a little bit. The past is boring! I teach history - I know what most people think about having to look back, and even worse, learn from it. Gasp.

When I was in a better place yesterday, I read this Atlantic article about stressors and their effect on the unborn fetus. Written by a husband and father, it raised a lot of interesting issues regarding how maternity leave is handled in the US. It seems as though there are two poles - the traditionally conservative view of protecting the fetus (more so than the mother's health) by limiting what the mother can/should do during pregnancy, and the more modern feminist view of a woman having complete equality to men no matter what, including not being labeled as "disabled" during their pregnancy (and thereby not getting any special treatment during those 9 months by their employers). I'm weighing in to say both sides are wrong here. Sure, I might disagree that pregnant women shouldn't be labeled as disabled -it's kind of weird honestly- but maybe a different distinction that disallows their employer from requesting that they continue on as though their condition is completely NOT a hindrance to their expected duties. We have to focus on equity and not absolute equality in cases like these. Otherwise we put undue stress on everyone. If we truly care about women, children, families, traditions, equity in the workplace, gender pay gaps, etc, we need to recognize individuals as unique and that a one-size-fits-all ruling will likely harm many people it was created to help. For example, single mothers or women working part time are less likely to be able to feasibly take much time off before or after their babies are born due to the fact that they might HAVE to work. This may also stress the mother, and subsequently, the baby out, causing a host of health problems for both in the future. Their employment status is not always due to their "inability to work hard" or their education level. There are a lot of good people out there today who are well-educated, qualified and willing to work, but there's nothing out there but a sea of entry level, retail and various part-time jobs.

So I am asking, what can we do to change this course we're currently on as a society - a course that finds every expenditure a chore. Sometimes a society needs to INVEST (which is a nice way of saying, spend some goddamn money) to get returns. If you want to clean up poor neighborhoods and end achievement gaps between the US and other countries, money and time has to be invested into improving public schools, not just constantly poking at them. This would include actually training and hiring quality teachers, ensuring that the school is run well, that funds are used properly, etc. It does not necessarily mean that a new curriculum or testing strategy should be adopted. Sure, Finland is homogenous and has a small population so their methods work for them, blah blah. I have heard all of the criticisms of Finland's schools and why it wouldn't work here. If that's the case, shouldn't Finland take the easy way out and just test the shit out of their kids? I mean, why spend time and energy and money to pay teachers more, have more class options and activities for a cohort of children that could learn easily from drill and kill since there's less diversity to overcome? Well, because the teachers and education community in Finland VALUE what they do by providing students with an enriched environment full of openness, play and personal inquiry. 

And to think, this all started with thoughts about a sick guinea pig. Some days I would just like to turn my brain off.