Areas of Unrest

6 February 2000 - Cause and Effect

QOTD: "If most things aren't funny, then they're only exactly what they are; then life's just one long dental appointment, interrupted occasionally by something exciting, like waiting or falling asleep. What's the point if I leave everything just the way I find it? Then I'm just adding to the noise, then I'm just taking up some more room on the subway." - Herb Gardner

Reading: March 2000 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine

Listening to: Snakefarm, Songs From My Funeral

I went through a lot of papers today and found a couple of things I'd clipped, planning to write about them. The first had to do with a standard for digital radio. Apparently, Europe is converging on a standard - and the U.S. has not yet decided whether to go with that standard or with another one. It seems to me that this is pretty short-sighted. I don't care what is technically superior. If we don't do what the rest of the world does, we cut ourselves out of markets. It's one thing when there's an established tradition, e.g. our lack of metrication. (I should note that I do wish we would bite the bullet and go metric, but I can understand why we don't even as I disagree.) But this is new technology so it's not like there's any reasonable excuse for being different.

The second item I found is about a survey in June of 1999 that asked 400 people to name the 10 most stressful issues of the previous 12 months. The results were:

1. Learning to use the Internet
2. Gun violence and kids
3. Waiting to see "Star Wars Episode I - The Phantom Menace"
4. China stealing U.S. military secrets
5. The JonBenet Ramsay murder case
6. Michael Jordan retiring
7. Airing of NBC's final episode of "Seinfeld"
8. Hillary Clinton's potential U.S. Senate candidacy
9. Y2K
10. Plane crashes in the news

But how could Hillary's senatorial campaign be more stressful than the impeachment of her husband? Why would anyone outside Boulder find the JonBenet Ramsay murder stressful? (If you do live there, I can understand it since nobody wants to believe their local police force is hopelessly incompetent.) And getting stressed out over television and sports news just seems to me to suggest you need a life.

Okay, some sports news is stressful, but this survey was in June - before the Red Sox playoff games.

While I wouldn't call it stressful, I did also hear some literary news that disappointed me. Sarah Caudwell, who was one of the best and funniest mystery writers ever, died recently. Her Thus Was Adonis Murdered was one of those books that I was embarrassed to read in public because I laughed out loud so often. I understand that she had completed a fourth and final novel that will be published within the year. But, alas, that is all.

Since I alluded to it above, yes, I did go to Boulder again this week. I found out at about 1 p.m. on Monday that Milo wanted a bunch of us to go to a meeting on Wednesday (which means flying out Tuesday afternoon). Not only did I have to scramble with my own arrangements, but I had to notify the others and get them organized. Some of the work was worthwhile, but I'd really have liked more notice.

As for Boulder food reports, we went to Zolo one night, where I had delicious trout with a chipotle sauce and a sort of coleslaw variant made with chayote squash. Wednesday night saw us at Panasia Fusion; it was particularly hard to decide what to eat there, but I ended up choosing ahi, which was perfectly seared (i.e. mostly raw) and accompanied by risotto and greens and a wasabi-soy sauce mixture. I also splurged with ginger ice cream for dessert. Thursday night's excursion was the Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse, since it was June's first trip to Boulder and that's as much a tourist destination as a restaurant. Every time I go there, I notice other things about the building. This time, we sat by the fountain, which has a nice array of sculptures and plants. And the food wasn't bad at all - a Thai vegetable curry, accompanied by a spectacularly good green tea called Clouds and Mist.

This weekend's wave of housework included a lot of cooking as I made a huge pot of bean and barley soup and some chili. The idea was to fill the freezer so I won't need to do last minute shopping after trips out of town. The combination of simmering soup and going through old clippings and putting photos in albums put me in a nostalgic mood. I used to make this sort of earnestly healthy soup all the time when I was in grad school. It takes hours to cook, but it isn't your time. Kidney beans, northern beans, chick peas all soaked overnight, tossed in a pot with lentils, split peas (both green and yellow), barley, potatoes, carrots, onion, garlic, and herbs, covered with water and set over a low burner at least overnight and often longer. There's nothing better for counteracting winter and, if you bake some bread as well, your whole kitchen takes on a new character, almost morphing into an ancient hearth.

Somehow that got me to thinking about causes. I haven't had a cause for a long time. Even doing the 3 Day Walk in October had more to do with challenging myself than with where the money went. I did feel it was going to a good cause - breast cancer education and early detection services are important - but I didn't feel like I was on a giant crusade to save the world. And I used to have lots of causes. I grew up standing outside shopping centers with donation cans for whatever the cause of the month was. I circulated petitions, wore a P.O.W. bracelet, boycotted grapes, went to rallies on behalf of Soviet Jews and Syrian Jews, wrote letters to the editor on dozens of subjects. All of that seems a long time ago - mostly because it is a long time ago. I've avoided any sort of activism since college and this year will be my 20th college reunion.

Oh, I give money to charity. I've always liked that the Hebrew word for charity, "tzedakah", literally translates as "justice." I'm generous with the checkbook, but I'm all too skilled at the urban art of not seeing panhandlers. (I do give money to street musicians, though.) It bothers me that I'm not really doing anything directly, that I'm paying other people to do the actual charitable work.

There's another side of this that's more complicated. My business trip reading was Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, which had been recommended to me by several people for a long time. The story is about the deaths on Mt. Everest in 1996 and, while climbing Everest isn't one of my fantasies, there's a part of me that wishes I was the sort of person who did do things like that. That led me to thinking about some of the things I've often said I wanted to do, the ones I'd pretty much abandoned for various reasons. And the top of that list is hiking the length of the Appalachian Trail. I realized that I am far more likely to undertake that sort of expedition if it were for a cause, instead of just for myself.

But what cause? There's a man who walks the trail, teaching people along the way to dance. That sounds frivolous, but I'm not sure it is. He's giving them the gift of joy in their bodies, a gift that all of us could use.

I wish there was something I felt that strongly about. I've been mulling it over and not found an answer yet. I have a general idea that it would have to do with education and probably with literacy. Can one carry enough books comfortably in a backpack to make it feasible to hand them out along the way? Would that even be meaningful? Is this an entirely insane idea?

I'm not going to do anything immediately. For one thing, I'd need a few years to prepare for the hike itself, not the least of which would be taking most of a year off from work again. In the meantime, I can start researching just what it would take.

Give me five years and a lift to Mt. Katahdin and just watch me walk south with a song on my lips and a cause in my heart.