Alex Krogh-Grabbe

This is the first day of my cross-country train trip. I’m getting on the train at noon in Brattleboro, Vermont, and arriving in New York City later this afternoon. I’ll chronicle my adventure bit by bit here on the blog, interspersed with other fare more like what I’ve been posting recently.

In New York I’m staying with Nicole, my girlfriend, who just graduated from Swarthmore College yesterday (congratulations, Nicole!) I’m excited to  introduce her to one of my oldest friends, who happens to be in the city these days. It’s another step in strengthening our connection. One other strengthening routine that I’m excited to implement with Nicole when she moves to Boston is to go for a walk every day. I got the idea from a recent post on Zen Habits about how to keep your relationship safe from the everyday stress and chaos that engulfs so much of our attention.

I’ll be in New York for two days, and then it’s off to our nation’s capital (as Forrest Gump calls it…”I’m glad we were here together in our nation’s capital”) for a few days. Thanks for being interested in hearing about my travels!

David Roberts has a scary article on Grist asking that question.

It’s entirely possible, even likely, that we’re going to be stuck helplessly watching as this well spews oil into the Gulf for years. Even if the flow were stopped tomorrow, the damage to marshes, coral, and marine life is done. The Gulf of Mexico will become an ecological and economic dead zone. There’s no real way to undo it, no matter who’s in charge.

This is such a tragedy, many people don’t even want to think about it. The way I react in crises is to analyze what needs to be done to solve the problem, but I’m flummoxed in cases like this where there may be no solution. I suppose my next reaction would be to ask what we can do to minimize the damage. Build a sea wall from Florida to the Yucatan? I don’t know.

Roberts reminds us that one major cause of this disaster is the fragility of the system we’ve built to feed our oil addiction. The article is very good; I strongly recommend reading it. We can point fingers all we want, and a certain measure of responsibility certainly lies in each of the corporate and regulatory players in the fiasco. The best way, though, to make sure something like this never happens again is to speak up for renewable energy and against fossil fuel extraction. Working to minimize our own fossil fuel use and that of other people also helps. Only from a vocal public will government have enough political power to overrule corporate pressure and do the right thing in energy policy. You can already see Obama trying to channel the outrage in this direction. Let’s help him out by directing our outrage appropriately.

How hollow do “Drill Here, Drill Now!” and “Drill, Baby, Drill!” sound now? Think Sarah Palin will campaign on that platform in 2012?

I remembered something the other day. I had revamped my Couchsurfing profile in the morning, and one of the (optional) questions was for ethnicity. I declined to answer, as I normally do when asked that question on a form, but seeing that surely contributed to the revelation I had later on: It’s easy to forget the privilege of being white, or being male, or being from the upper-middle class. Everything is a little easier for being any one of those things, and while a combination of all three doesn’t hand the world to you on a silver platter, it means that you start the game off with a serious societal advantage. There’s a certain amount of guilt and discomfort that goes along with recognizing such privilege, and some people I know have thought a lot more about it than I have. But because I don’t think about it frequently, I always appreciate being reminded of the privilege, because most of all it makes me grateful. What are your thoughts about privilege?

Next time you are hanging out with me, know that I enjoy time spent hanging out in trees more than I enjoy time spent shopping.

I went to Salvation Army yesterday and bought some clothes. I went by myself, and was done rather quickly. I was planning on taking the bus home, but because I missed one bus by several minutes and the summer schedule has about an hour wait between, I walked home on the bike path. The shade provided by the trees shrouding the path made the temperature perfect. I cleared a few small branches left on the bike path by the storm.

Later in the day, I hung out with some friends from high school. We went into Northampton, and they strolled around shopping while I tagged along. I enjoyed hanging out with them, but after a while, I usually tire of consumerism. So I left one store and climbed the tree right outside it. That was a much preferable location.

Next time I see you, if we have the option of looking at things in a store or climbing a tree, may I suggest that we consider the latter option?

Today I got done the two most intimidating items on my to-do list: the phone interview from yesterday and a call to the Tufts financial aid office. Neither really felt too stressful at the time, but once I got them done, I felt great, like I’d had a weight lifted off my shoulders. I’ve written before about how doing such things can feel great, but it’s important to remind oneself. Furthermore, an original insight for this post is that stressful things aren’t always identifiable as stressful in the heat of the moment. But if you can manage to put your finger on what it is you’ve been putting off, do it, and you’ll feel great.

[Other great happy things right now: these two baked goods from Rao's Coffee in Amherst. I swear their baked goods under the new management rival the Black Sheep Deli. And another great coffeeshop-related happy thing: I ran into an old friend from high school! We caught up a bit and are hanging out more later tonight! Yay serendipity!]

I spent most of today being anxious over the scheduling of an interview. The main problem was that there wasn’t specific enough conversation far enough in advance. Everything is resolved now, but the lesson I learned from the experience is that when responsible people are very busy, sometimes they don’t get back to you. That’s okay; we’re all inclined to do it. But when you don’t hear back in a timely fashion from someone you expect to, make a follow-up call. Doing that a week ago would have saved me all the subdued anxiety I felt today.

I had such a productive afternoon. I called people I needed to call, I sent emails right and left, I researched things I needed to research. And yet, at one point, I’d only crossed one thing off my to-do list. I bet you’ve experienced something similar if you keep to-do lists. It can feel depressing, because it feels like you’re treading water.

But I look at it a little differently. It is the feeling of productivity itself that is fulfilling for me, the feeling that I’m getting important things done. The to-do list is just a reminder of some of those things. So, this phenomenon of doing important things which aren’t on the list is more an indication of my list’s inadequacy than an indictment of my time management. I should make a better list next time. It’s a much more positive way to look at things.

I just have to relate to you this story that my friend just told me about what she did yesterday afternoon. She went to Harvard Square to buy something, but couldn’t for whatever reason. Instead, she decided to sit on Cambridge Common and read for a bit. But after a little while, people started to gather and play games near her, and they invited her to participate. So she played games (all sorts of games, from tag to bananagrams to improv games) with them for several hours! And then to cap it all off, she then saw her cousins morris dancing close enough by for her to watch while she played games! How serendipitous.

Put it on your agenda: reading in public spaces and being open to joining other people’s fun is a great way to enjoy fabulous weather. Or you could organize such games yourself, and invite folks who you see reading nearby!

Yesterday I had a personal reminder of why planning is important. I drove with a friend from Philadelphia to Stamford, CT. On the way, we were stuck in horrendous traffic all around New York. Being stuck in traffic is absolutely no fun, even with the best of company. You can’t refill your water bottle, there’s no bathroom to use, and you can’t get up to stretch sore muscles. Cars isolate their drivers and passengers from the potential community around them. They pump disastrous carbon into the atmosphere, and particulate toxins into our lungs. Bad news all around. Time for some transportation policy progress.

Then, when we arrived in Stamford, I was reminded how quintessentially suburban that place is. I believe yesterday was the first time I ever set foot in a true mcmansion. It was big enough to get lost in, cloistered at the end of a manicured winding road around a lake, guarded at its entrance by a gatekeeper in a little house. Such land use waste is nauseatingly opulent. How do you broach the subject with people who are friendly, welcoming, and hospitable to you? It’s very delicate, yet it’s such an egregious breach of environmental and social justice that it must be addressed. I would be interested to hear your thoughts in the comments.

The Gulf oil disaster is the most horrendous disaster to strike the US in living memory. While it may not yet have killed as many as Katrina or 9/11, its consequences have the potential to be more akin to Chernobyl: profoundly affecting people and animals over a wide geographical area. The current question, though, is who should pay the monumental costs of clean-up. BP certainly had the poor safety record that allowed the equipment failure to happen, but it was the oil habit and policies of the American people which created the situation. The first thing to know about raising oil companies’ liability for off-shore drilling is that the proposal in the Senate is to raise it from $75 million to $10 billion. The Gulf oil disaster will cost much more than $10 billion to clean up. So the effort is to make oil companies shoulder a fair portion of the cleanup cost, not to specify the exact ratio. Raising the liability limit seemingly would make it financially inviable for oil companies to drill in the ocean anymore, due to the insurance they would have to buy. David Roberts has a great article on Grist outlining the realities of the debate.

Roberts has also recently taken up the flag of the American Power Act, otherwise known as the Kerry-Lieberman climate bill. The bill gets us started on ending our oil addiction, and due to political prospects for the next few elections, it is the last chance we have to do so in a reasonably comfortable fashion. Roberts’ argument to this effect is here. There has been a thorough analysis of the bill’s merits by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, which Roberts summarizes here. But it’s not going so well. Conventional wisdom is that it’s doomed. Roberts asserts that only a strong push from Obama and all Democratic leadership, combined with organizing in key legislators’ constituencies, will give the bill a chance. It needs an effort as big as the health care bill. It’s hard to see that happening, though. But since it’s the last boat off Oil Island, we’d better try to take it.