On New Year’s Eve, my friend Molly told me that she has started referring to working out as “writing a love letter to yourself” because “that’s what you’re doing; telling your body that you love it.” I like that. 

At 4 o’clock this afternoon I picked up my sister who was coming home from a weekend trip to OSU with friends and she asked me why I was wearing high heels. I told her it was New Year’s Day and I had to look fancy. 

I read this list from Gala Darling, check it out: 10 Fantastic Ways to Get Ready for 2012!

I’ve been thinking about the new year all day long, as most probably have and I’ve been journaling like crazy the most random things. I didn’t make resolutions, but I’ve made a lot of lists and things regarding how I want 2012 to go, goals I want to accomplish, and things I have to do to make them happen. Among them is a list of things I want to practice in 2012:

• unplugging from ALL things electronic (cell phone, iPod & Kindle included) - minimum 2 consecutive hours in a day (when I am NOT sleeping)
• budgeting & using cash rather than credit ($40 a month for eating out, $30 on thrift shopping, $150 for gas/toiletries/groceries; $20 alcohol; I know this seems small, but when I am at school it is plenty) - I used to do this and do it well, but I’ve gotten lazy lately. 
• eat more salad, drink more tea, drink more water; eat less bread, drink less coffee, drink less alcohol, eat less milk chocolate; gomeatless as much as possible
• more pleasure reading - minimum 15 minutes per day
• more (free) writing - minimum 15 minutes per day
• more consistently writing love letters to myself - 4x per week, 1 hour per day
• afternoon walks to get sunlight & fresh air - minimum 15 minutes per day, rain/snow/hail/ice storm be damned
• be more aware of plastic pervading our lives & trying to reduce my contact/consumption/purchase of plastic products
• regularly scheduled de-cluttering sessions - possibly monthly, with the question in mind, “have I used/touched/wore/thought of this in the last six months?
• not letting things pile up: it’s amazing how little time and effort it takes to keep things clean/organized if you do something, like hang your jacket in the closet, as soon as you think of it/walk through your door. 
• spend more time looking fancy - even if it doesn’t seem like there is much of an occasion for it
• driving in high heels (this is really hard!)

After failing to gather friends to go with me, I made a 45 minute trip up to Adrian, MI solo to see Windfall, a documentary about wind energy (see trailer here). I got interested in the topic a couple weeks ago when I was watching a [20/20, Dateline, 60 minutes?] segment about prisoners using Facebook. There was a segment after that about wind energy. It was actually a very positive story about a brewery in Kansas, I believe, that was completely self-sufficient with its energy. Anyhow, here are some of the notes from the film:

• Town in question: Meredith, NY, a rural and residential town that had over 1000 dairy farms in its heyday, but today has less than 10. Niche farmers have found some success there (ie, organic vegetable, grass-fed beef); others work in the city, retreating to Meredith for quiet weekends or to retire. 
• A number of residents in the town were being approached by wind-energy companies; those who signed contracts with intent to have turbines erected on their property had idyllic thoughts about ending oil dependency and doing their part toward ending global warming; some thought wind turbines were beautiful when they’d seen them from the highway; others figured this was a windy part of the state, why shouldn’t they be using that energy? Others pictured the windmills in Don Quixote. 
• There was little discussion, little research, and little community outreach. The company representatives seemed to gloss over the fact that the turbines would be 400 ft tall, with 137 ft long blades, rotating at 150 mph, “not human scale,” one resident said. They didn’t accurately represent the noise pollution, the oil leaks from the turbines or sediment run-off, the fact that they need to be heated in the winter so as not to freeze (using more energy than creating), and that they can throw snow and ice. 
• Most residents were offered $5000 to sign the contract, as well as promised annual revenue for themselves and the town, later to find out that 90% of the profit off these turbines goes to the company, with a small fraction going to the landowners and towns. 
• Resistance started with one couple who hired a lawyer to get them out of the contract. The woman, S.B. had driven to a neighboring county where wind turbines had been erected already. She turned her car off and rolled down the windows about three miles from the windfarm. She said that it wasn’t so much that the sound bothered her at that moment, but “the idea that it was forever.”
• The town of Lowville, NY is the sight of Tug Hill windfarm. The project was supposed to be 20 wind turbines when they originally signed contracts. Now there are 195 turbines there.  The residents have reported cardiovascular problems, trouble sleeping, dizziness, increased absenteeism from work and in schools. One man described the sound as “like your vacuum cleaner is running all day and night right next to your bed.” And one woman who’s home was 1050 ft. from a turbine said that sometimes it sounds like the sound is in her walls. A man who contemplated moving to the town said there was a community land agreement for people who live near the turbines giving them $500 a year, an amount he called an insult. 
• “This energy doesn’t solve the problem,” a former financial advisor, now resident of Meredith said of wind power. He did his research, finding out that the wind turbines operate sporadically, often displacing natural gas plants when they are going. However, coal and nuclear plants are always on and still where the majority of U.S. energy is produced. In Congress, they believe that within 10 years (from 2009 when the film was in production), 20% of our energy could be generated by windfarms. [Doesn’t seem like enough to me…what do you think?] Meanwhile, the turbines use grid energy to keep them from freezing in cold weather. The energy used to transport and erect the 400 ft turbines further cuts into their energy-saving usefulness. Along roads, trees have been cut down so that the shadows from the rotating blades create less glare for passing drivers. Finally, studies show that bats and other small, flying creatures caught in the air too close to these turbines have lung hemorrhages and die [how’s that for environmentally friendly?].
• One man said, “These things will probably be obsolete in 20 years. Then what?” That is precisely the question. What do we do with these towering monstrosities? “The only way to solve the problem we’re in,” he continued, “is to reduce.”
• Other towns in Delaware County, NY have banned wind energy altogether. In Meredith, the town council tried to compromise rather than ban outright. The town planning board recommended that a turbine be 1600 ft from any property line and one mile from a residence. These numbers severely limited the number of turbines any company would have been able to erect in the town, as most companies are looking to maximize profit in an area, putting up at least 20-40 turbines. 
• Just 20 miles south of Toledo, Bowling Green is the sight of Ohio’s first “windfarm,” four wind turbines, each 391 ft. tall. They are six miles from the small college-town’s city limits and they generate enough energy to power homes of 3000 residents. 
• Lenewee County, where Adrian, MI is located, is a target for wind companies now. One woman I spoke to before the film lived 40 minutes from Adrian and was opposed because she had heard there is a large decline in property values after the turbines go up. Driving through Blissfield, about 10 miles from Adrian, I saw billboards advertising support for the wind-energy project, but saw yard signs in opposition. 
• Personally, I think these turbines are more trouble than they are worth! And I agree with one interviewee from the documentary: this isn’t about green, it’s about greed! If there wasn’t big money involved, I don’t think the companies would be working so hard to hide from people how detrimental the turbines have to potential to be if people are too close to them. 
• Other nearby wind projects making news: Detroit Metro Airport, Lake Erie near Cleveland. 

Cornel West: Race and Democracy in the Age of Obama
Kenyon College
February 18, 2011

• Human is from the Latin “humando,” or burying. We are a race disappearing from history - Who are you going to be in the meantime between the womb and the tomb?
• we should be turning the soul from the superficial to the substantial
• memory, history, and reality are forms of mortality
• be suspicious of sanitized discourses: a condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak
• indifference is the essence of inhumanity
• do you know the difference between success and greatness?
• education is a right, not a race
• if you choose to be a certain kind of human being, you have to raise your voice. You cannot be an echo.
• hope is not the same as optimism. justice is not revenge. 
• be a blues woman or a blues man: no people have a monopoly over that.

In my favorite creative writing class, we were made to practice collecting writing advice and to put it into the margins, covers, pages of our notebooks. It’s a habit I’ve never quite kicked. Jonathan Franzen came to visit our campus tonight. Overall I was not impressed by his ability to read straight from a piece of paper, digressing every so often to claim that he hadn’t looked at this particular talk since he’d written it over a year ago. Thanks for coming to our campus prepared, pal. I hope your commencement speech gives more confidence that you gave it some thought than tonight’s talk did. 

Although I wasn’t impressed by Jonathan Franzen at all, I will not be so silly as to say that I didn’t get anything out of his talk (or, what I think could have been much more enjoyable had I read it as an essay, like A Room of One’s Own). So here I give you, the writing advice I managed to scrounge up from his poorly-read-verbatim-essay:

• fiction is a vehicle of self-investigation
• you must love your characters, but you must be hard on them
• reading and writing fiction are forms of active social engagement - the making of friends and enemies
• literature is not about being nice
• there is a difference between your idea in the abstract and the work on the page: conceivable human behavior
• the reason that a character cannot do something is because you cannot do it
• the novel ought to be autobiographical - a reflection of your personal struggle to understand the world
• fiction is a dream that has meaning; it gives meaning to dreams
• the more autobiographical a work, the less it resembles the superficial details of a writer’s life
• literature cannot be a performance - it must entail risk, the unknown, darkness, surmounting resistance 
• a truism exists that each person has within him/her one novel: once you’ve written that one novel you must become someone different to write your next one
• all loyalties, familial and otherwise, are meaningless until they are challenged: make the people in your life you wish to write about rise to the occasion of being written about
• novels are about people
• the novel exists on a spectrum, with the indifference to human reality at one extreme and moralistic simplicity at the other; the things that we like tend to fall around the middle

and apparently you can watch the whole thing on youtube! yay?

Coffeeshop = $1.79
Haircut+Tip=$27
Kindle+Tax=$149.44
Ebay: Kindle Case= $9.49

Total $187.72

Too bad that I stopped selling Cutco. Those were the days when I could make up for this in an hour’s worth of work on a Saturday afternoon. 

1. Bad Omen: dropping the bag with new kindle inside on the snowy porch while trying to unlock the house door. 

2. ACCESS to the Oxford English Dictionary when not on college campus - HELLO, you are worth your $139+tax already!

3. The Complete Works of Jane Austen, Kindle Edition $0.99. OMG Jane and I can go everywhere together!

4. Not reading on my computer or printing PDFs of Dante’s Purgatorio (250 pgs), The Trial and Death of Socrates (40 pgs), or The Epic of Gilgamesh (30 gs), and carrying Hacker’s MLA updates with me like this. 

Long story short, I am in love. New mission is to buy one of those cute little cases that make it look like a book!

I’m going on hiatus, friends! 

That is, effective today, a trusty friend has changed my password and I will be locked out of my facebook and my tumblr until December 17, 4:30 pm-ish. This is when my last paper is due to my Psych professor during finals week. Ideally, I will hand it in early, but I’ll not make any promises right now. Anyway, I decided to do this after the extreme struggle I had to get anything accomplished during Thanksgiving Break. I actually did this same thing for the last two weeks of the fall semester sophomore year, and it went pretty well.

My goals in this endeavor are these:

1. Have no ability to procrastinate for endless hours facebook stalking and reading blogs.
2. To accomplish tasks more quickly and effectively,
3. in order that I will not become a stressed, sleep-deprived, hot mess during the last two weeks of classes and during finals week.
4. Which, in turn, will possibly help me maintain my immune system so that the first three days of break are not spent nursing a cold.
5. Also, so that my workout/social life/extracurriculars do not absolutely have to be sacrificed in order to finish assignments.
6. To explore free time pursuits that are not central to internet access - Do you remember how you used to occupy yourself before you had the internet?
7. Document this technology-restricted adventure in writing and share it with cyberspace when I make my grand re-entrance.

I’m excited.

Don’t forget to remember me, friends.  

I’ve always been a fan of NBC’s The Biggest Loser, but now in its tenth season, I’ve watched with apprehension, loving the show and hating it all at once. 

They’ve given the statistic over and over this season that 2 out of 3 Americans are obese, surpassing the number of people who are overweight. That’s shocking because our society, I have found is overwhelmingly “health conscious” and concerned with “being healthy.” Of course, I’m not unfamiliar with the statistics: people spend $40 billion dollars annually on diet programs and products, and 95% of diets fail. At my own gym, I’ve seen overweight and obese women on the machines who don’t know how to use them properly and who also don’t seem to be pushing themselves at all, some don’t even sweat as they mindlessly read the latest US Weekly on the lazy bike. 

After watching the first five episodes this season, I’ve made some observations:

• “finalists” were grouped into pools of three in seven cities nationwide and they competed at big rallies for their spots on the show. In some cities they had to complete 500 step-ups and in others they had to finish a one-mile race. The two that did this fastest were brought to The Ranch. The latter seemed more challenging, but also more competitive because you could keep track of each other. On the other hand, with the 500 steps the contestants couldn’t see the progress of the others. However, in an overall sense, I didn’t think the challenges were great because they forced morbidly obese men and women to push themselves far past their limits, exerting themselves on a physical level that their bodies have not seen in years, if ever. People were passing out and falling down and it was a mess. 
• likewise, they do the same thing when the contestants get to The Ranch. They are thrust into the gym with Bob and Jillian and sweat profusely, hyperventilate, and suck down water. They throw up and pass out and fall on the ground. At the level of their conditioning from day one, many if not all suffer some kind of injury such as muscle strain and stress fracture. 
• In addition, their calories are cut immediately from whatever they were eating before, some as many as 6000 calories per day, to less than 2000. They aren’t gradually eased into a healthy lifestyle that is realistic to what they’ll experience outside of the Ranch. And the shock to their systems must have long term affects, not to mention those in the immediate present. On top of that, Jillian and Bob seem like they are psychologically torturing them: yelling in their faces and forcing them to push the physical limits they have. 
• Age doesn’t bode well for anyone, either. You have to be pretty young to succeed on this show. On very few seasons have contestants over 40 succeeded in terms of winning. 
• I get angry about the “game play,” which starts immediately, eliminating someone during the first week, before they’ve had a chance to really change their lives or absorb the lessons for how they should workout, eat, and live in the real world while struggling with obesity. 
• Finally, I get upset about gender. The women always perform poorly compared to the men. This is because all of them men come in weight at over 300 pounds, but few of the women do. The women usually range 250-350 pounds. The men have so much more weight to lose that they are able to lose double digits week after week. The women have less weight to lose in general and so their bodies resist that. Sometimes women win, but men have the ultimate advantage.