This one is from November 3rd, 2008, when I was living in a van.

Please Get Cancer So The Economy Will Improve

The “economy” is something I’m supposed to worry about. I don’t. Obviously, I’m a weird hippie who skims and mooches by on a few hundred dollars a month, so the economy means a lot less to me than other people. I understand why people are worried about jobs and homes and the price of food, even if I’m not.

That said, I don’t trust the entire concept of this economy that we’re supposed to worry about the health of. Presidents and reporters urge us to spend more, because spending more is “good for the economy,” and somehow if the economy is good, we’ll have more money to spend.

But what is this economy thing?  Often, it’s talked about in terms of GNP, which is the total dollar value of final goods and services. We’re told this number is supposed to be big. In grade school, I remember hearing about the GNP of different nations. Ours was great. For other countries, we laughed at their little numbers.

In what way does this system measure the health of a nation? Since GNP only looks at things that have a monetary value, it seems possible that it risks measuring the non-health of a nation. The truth is that many of the things that indicate a quality of life, a richness and fullness of life, and a reflection of basic values simply cannot be measured by money. On the other hand, illness – both mental, physical, and spiritual – can be measured financially.

• If I garden for much of my food, contributing t o the my health through good nutrition, more leisure time, and physical activity, I’m doing a crappy job of contributing to my economy. On the other hand, if I eat fast food, magic restaurant calories, and overly processed grocery store food, the economy goes up-up-up.
• If I like to walk in the evenings, take a swim in my pond in the mornings, and hike on the weekends, the GNP doesn’t notice. If I work 60 hours a week, eat all that crappy food, and join a gym I never go to, yay economy.
• If I’m giving birth and have several supportive friends and family members by my side, the economy doesn’t go up as much as if I’m alienated and physically distance from any support group and instead hire a doula.
• Forget walking or biking, enabled by living, working, and playing in the same area. It’s good for the economy if you buy a house in the suburbs and then your family needs three cars to get around.
• Trees standing in a forest? Not good. Trees cut down and used for whatever? Good for the economy.
• And please get cancer. Cancer is GREAT for the econom y. Obviously, some people get cancer in ways we don’t quite understand or that relate to genetics. But for the rest of you, if you could please get busy smoking, gorging on straight-to-your-arteries food, laying in tanning beds, living surrounded by smog, and ingesting as many chemicals as you possibly can, your e conomy would really appreciate it. All those ways you can try to get there cost lots of money, and in the end you might get cancer, which is even better!

Buying things is good for the economy, and therefore maybe you get to be a good American. It doesn’t matter if it’s healthy for you – in fact, it’s probably better if it isn’t – just buy it!

On the other hand, reducing your spending, having a support network of close people, providing for yourself from the land, contributing to your health simply by not buying the things that deteriorate it, downgrading your drive for “progress”, and enjoying simple pleasures is often the antithesis of contributing to the economical health of your nation.

When I prioritize mental health, physical health, social health, environmental health, and spiritual health, the health of my economy ceases to concern me at all.

The other night, I was hungering for something restaurant-y, but I didn’t want to head out to an actual restaurant to get it. I opened up my Better Homes and Gardens cookbook determined to make myself something yummy. I don’t have very much experience cooking, but I was sure I could find something. The very first item in the very first section (appetizers) was pizza rolls. Ah ha! Cheese! Meat! Bread! Hard to go wrong.

The recipe called for using refrigerated store-bought biscuit rolls. Nope! I turned to another section of the cookbook to turn up a biscuit recipe before I could get started on the pizza rolls.

I used Joshua’s trick of shredding frozen butter to simplify adding butter to the dry ingredients:

The insides are simply pizza sauce, shredded mozzerella cheese (I used a “pizza” mix), and shredded pepperoni.

I used the 3 inch dough circle thingie to make the rolls. They were big enough, I think, but I might not have had the dough thin enough. It was very tricky to get enough pizza stuff in there and make it STAY!

A lot of the pizza insides cooked out in the baking. It wasn’t lost, though. I simply scraped up that baked pizza stuff and piled it on top of the rolls.

The bottom line: I didn’t like these all that much. They tasted like random pizza stuff in a biscuit, which is what they were, but which is not exactly what I want from a pizza roll. Still, it was a perfectly satisfying snack in the moment, and I’m so glad I didn’t go out to a restaurant! It’s very fun and very rewarding to try to make stuff that I really like at home!

This one is from July 31st, 2008, when I was living in a van.

Failure of Expectation

A friend recently asked me about why I was living in a van. Didn’t I like living in a house? I said, yes, I had liked my house okay, but I was never there. Between work, being at my boyfriend’s house, etc., I was only there a couple of nights a week, and then mostly to just grab some stuff or to sleep.

I had an odd little moment where I realized that that’s mostly what I’m doing with the van, too. With temperatures being so high, I’m mostly just in the van to grab some things or to go to sleep. I spend my time at my boyfriend’s house, working online at Chick fil A, or spending all day at the gaming bar on free ladies day. So why the van, if I’m not living in it any more than I was living in my house.

I realized that expectation is the difference in what makes the van more comfortable for me. Having a whole house creates a certain set of expectations just by its being and by your having it.

There’s a full kitchen, a huge fridge, a microwave, an oven, a stove, a dishwasher, all of which communicates the expectation that you’re going to have a variety of food on hand, spend time creating meals, make varied meals using different means. I never did that. I never used my stove or oven. My refrigerator never had more than 5 items in it.

There’s a dining room with a big table and seating for 6 or 8. This communicates the expectation that sometimes 6 or 8 people are going to sit there and eat or play games or plan a project together. I only ever once in the entire year I lived in my last house had more than one other person in my home.

There’s an extra bedroom, which communicates that sometimes, people are going to visit you over night and nee a room of their own. This never happened, the whole time I was in that house.

There’s another bedroom, which communicates that you’re going to have an interest that takes up another room – maybe crafts, sewing, art projects, enough books for a library, etc.

There are lots of closets, which communicate that you’re going to have a great variety of stuff that you won’t need to access very often, so it’ll be okay to hide it away in closets.

The only one of these expectations that I met was the closet one. I had all the stuff. All the stuff sitting around being useless, being a weight. But everything else that a house begs for, I never fulfilled. I’m not very often into mystical woo-woo theories, but I do have to wonder what it does to you, what it means, to set yourself up for one kind of thing but then never rise to meet it. At the very least, I think it could go a ways to explaining the restlessness and discontent I felt living in a house.

One solution, of course, would be to start doing those other things – cooking more elaborate meals, inviting guests over for dinner, having out-of-town friends stay the night, developing a hobby that takes up room. I clearly wasn’t interested in those things, though, since I wasn’t doing them, even though I had the means to do so. To put effort into doing those things would contain an element of “should” for me.

The other solution is to tailor your surroundings, your possessions, your expectations, to what you actually want from your life. What you really want, not what you’re supposed to want.

I did not want space that begged to be filled with unused things. I wanted space that asked me to keep my possessions to a minimum. I did not want a dining room sitting abandoned. I wanted to meet my friends in restaurants and the woods and the gaming bar. I did not want a fully decked-out kitchen, enormous in size and unused absurdity. I wanted a two burner cook-stove and a little cooler that perfectly held the kinds of meals I like to make. I did not want several rooms with doors hardly ever opened. I wanted one room just the right size for sleeping.

Now I have all that. I no longer have discontent with my living space, because rather than failing my expectations – and me failing them – my living space is exactly the same size as my expectations, my desires, and my life.

Edited to Add:

This is a great post for me to look back on, since I live in a house again. It’s interesting that some of the things that I never did before, like cooking at home, are now very interesting to me. I have almost all my meals at home now, and it’s great that I have a kitchen the size that I do. I think it’s just a reinforcement that cookie-cutter expectations never quite work out, even within the same person. There was a time in my life when a van was the right size home, and now is a time in my life that a house with 3 acres is the right size home. I’m so very glad that I did the van thing at the time, and I’m also glad to be at The Wallow now.

Anyway, after a shower the other day, I decided the time had come, season notwithstanding. I picked 6 inches as the right number. I took each individual dreadlock, measured up six inches, and snipped it off.

Here’s the pile of cut-off sections laid out on the bathroom counter. It looks like a lot of hair.

However, when I gathered it all into a bunch, you can see that it’s not so much in volume overall. I have really thin hair, so even with dreadlocks, there’s not a lot to work with.

I bunched them up like this to take a look at the ends where you can see into the interior of the dreads. Some people when they cut their dreads find that the insides are kind of gross. If they mistakenly started their dreads with wax, there’ll be a lot of wax buildup on the insides. Or there will just be accumulated oil or whatever, especially if they’ve had trouble drying their dreads. I was happy to find that the insides of mine were pretty clean and dry.

One result of the cut is that they look a little more like dreadlocks now. Before, a good portion of that extra six inches was wispy undreaded hair. The full length of each dread is tangled now, giving them a more solid dread-y look.

I still haven’t gotten started on re-decorating them yet. Also planned for this summer is to phase out the dark colored wool wraps and add in some bright colored hippie beads and bright wraps. I’ll post pics of that when it happens, I’m sure!

In the meantime, here’s a recent shot of me, post-cut. It doesn’t show a lot of the dreads, but I think it’s super-cute, anyway.

Here’s an awesome video of a super-slo-mo dread flip. As a person with dreads, I love everything dread related, and this was a fantastic find. (h/t)

In case you can’t see the embedded video, check it out here.

I won’t be moving to my new house in Tennessee until October. So much waiting! I’m reading up on bees and pigs in the meantime, as well as prepping for Burning Man and Alchemy, which happen between now and then. There’s lots to do, but I’m spending a lot of time daydreaming away, too.

What will I be doing with my time on my little homestead? It’s hard to know until I’m there and doing it, but my brain is full of lists of all the things I think I’ll love doing. Especially when I’m trying to fall asleep, my thoughts go a mile a minute through all the different activities I think I’m going to absolutely delight in:

• Unpacking, organizing, and decorating the house
• Setting up work space in the barn
• Helping Joshua plan out our garden space and build raised beds
• Building a pen for the pigs I’ll have in the spring time
• Preparing the bee hive
• Walking around every inch of our land and falling in love
• Identifying the edible plants already in our yard
• Picking out orchard space and learning how to prepare the soil
• Building trellises/arbors for our back patio area
• Making sun tea and fresh bread often
• Learning canning and dehydrating to prepare for the summer bounty
• Sitting and swinging on our front porch swing
• Building a permanent compost bin
• Seeking out like-minded souls in the Knoxville area

The list could go on and on. I’m still a city girl at the moment, but I dream and dream and dream of the soon-to-be-mine log house, beautiful land, and endless opportunities of homesteading.

Back to the present. So how is the reality? One factor is that so many of these things won’t kick into full swing until spring. It’s wintertime on the homestead, which is a little more calm with many things in the planning stages. A similar post next fall would have a longer list of things already finished.

As it is, I have walked every inch of my property and fallen in love over and over again. Joshua and I moved in, unpacked, decorated, and organized all in one week, so we are thoroughly moved in. The workspace in the barn is all set up, although I have yet to build anything. I do make sweet tea (finally figured out the right recipe to make me happy) and we have fresh bread often. I’ve learned to dehydrate apple rings and banana chips. I love my porch swing, though less so today in the freezing wind.

Just today, Joshua is making intensive plans for the garden, and seeds will go in the dirt (in the house) this week. We think we’ve settled on orchard space. Pigs and chickens and bees and compost bins and arbor building are all spring projects (actually, it’s a pergola, and it might be a next year project).

Many things are happening, and many, many more are yet to come. I am both happily settled into my homestead and still daydreaming the extra happiness and activity yet to come.

This one is from August 16, 2008, when I was living in a van.

You’ve Finally Arrived

I heard a commercial on the radio the other day for a car dealership. Usually, I don’t listen to commercials. I change the station as soon as they start. This one caught my mind wandering though, and managed to sneak in a line. Here’s what I heard the moments before I got to the dial:

We have every car, from entry level to the car that says “You’ve arrived!”

I don’t like the sentiment behind “entry level”. Usually this is applied to jobs. An entry level job is the job you’re settling for until you can get something better. It’s seen as a hardship you must endure in order to gain greater advancement. Fuck that. What if it’s just my job? Maybe I’m not interested in gaining “levels” as if life is some elaborate D&D game where if you don’t hurry up and advance you might die any minute. With houses, you get “starter home”. Same sentiment. You’ve apparently not done well enough to have a “real” home, so you get this starter home thing where you’re biding your time until you can get into a house that counts. How about being happy where you are? Ugh.

Then, at the other end of the spectrum, apparently, is the job/house/car that says “You’ve arrived!” Where is it exactly that you’ve arrived? You’ve arrived at debt? You’ve arrived at the top of some gross competition? You’ve arrived at pretension? You’ve arrived at using more resources for more worthless stuff? You’ve arrived at loneliness, where your family is all isolated in their own suites? You’ve arrived at stress? You’ve arrived at clutter? You’ve arrived at committing more hours a week to a job that sucks you dry?

Where exactly are you, when you get to this place? I’m not an ascetic or anti-money. But I’ll take where I am, even with worrying about how to pay for van repairs now and then, over getting to any of those other places.

Edited to Add:

I no longer live in a van, and I no longer consider myself poor, but I still feel very strongly about the sentiments expressed in this post. I have purchased a house, but it is neither a starter house, nor some magical goal that’s meant to say something about my station in life. I have a job, but I’m less concerned with how much I’m making than with whether or not I’m enjoying myself and am happy with what I do. I do feel like I’ve “arrived” somewhere in the last year or so, but that place is happiness. I’ve arrived at happiness, and it’s tied up with being true to myself rather than acquiring certain things.

The picture I’ve included here is a shot of the inside of the van I lived in, which was one of my favorite homes in which I’ve ever dwelled.

Table of contents for The Burning Man 10 Principles

1. Burning Man – Radical Inclusion
2. Burning Man – Gifting
3. Burning Man – Decommodification

From the Burning Man website: Decommodification: “In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.”

To begin with, here is a post I made on my LJ in 2006, prior to going to Burning Man for the first time:

Burning Man is touted as a no-commerce event. It’s also viewed as a hippie/freak oasis miles away from the “default world”. The closer it gets to the event, though, the more grumbling I hear from people who are a little cynical about the ideals, because there is an insane amount of commerce going on.

I’m travelling light, because I’m only taking what I can get on a plane. Some people take furniture and generators and stages and art that towers into the sky. I can’t imagine what their bill is like. My tally is high enough though – ticket to Burning Man, airfaire, shipping containers, two nights hotel in Reno, rental car for a week, new tent, new sleeping bag, special tent stakes, random camping gear, try-to-survive-in-the-desert stuff (lotion, vinegar, nasal spray, eye drops, aloe, sun screen, lip balm, etc.), a gazillion glow sticks, blinkie toys, a new fire toy, aaaaaand all-new-clothes-including-five-pairs-of-new-shoes. This is the single most expensive experience in my life. Hmm. Maybe the tour of Europe, but my parents paid for that.  :-)

So, yeah, lots of commerce.

I’m not cynical, though. I never thought of Burning Man as making a particular statement about buying and selling. I might very well have communist leanings, but Burning Man doesn’t really fit into that for me. I just see it as taking a breather from commerce and especially advertising. Just because you want a break from something doesn’t mean you think it’s bad.

Commerce is everywhere. Advertising is nearly background noise. I find it cool to be going to a place where you bring everything you need, so there’s no need to sell it to you. And if there is something you need or want, you just have to ask for it, and it will probably be provided. Anytime a bunch of people gather together out in the middle of nowhere, it’s to try something different. Not being surrounded by advertising is definitely something different, and I really enjoy it for a few days.

If the Burning Man environment happened all the time, I would probably pay lots and lots of money to visit a place where glow sticks, people on stilts, techno, and shit on fire wasn’t allowed. I would consider that a very valuable experience. It’s the same for commerce and advertising.

And how about now, after more Burning Mans and more regionals? I’m still convinced that the decommodification is a valuable experience. For just a few days, I get to spend time in an environment where nothing about me or what I do or what I have is for sale and no one is trying to sell me anything of theirs either. It’s refreshing.

A friend of mine recently tried to convince me that burns are quite commodified after all. That I give of my time and effort at burns and these things are my commodities or the commodification of myself, and that even if I’m not exchanging them for money, I am exchanging them for other people’s participation in creating the burn. I didn’t fare very well in this conversation, because I didn’t have a quick definition of commodity off the top of my head. Was anything I had and offered to another person a commodity? That seemed strange, but, honestly, I wasn’t sure of the definition.

Now, at home, I can look in the dictionary. The second definition my dictionary gives is “Something useful or valued.” Okay, fine. That seems to be what my friend was talking about. The rest of the definitions seem much more specific, though, and more in line with the usual use of the word. “An economic good.” “An article of commerce especially when delivered for shipment.” “A mass-produced unspecialized product.” “Convenience, advantage.” My dictionaries second definition not-with-standing, fuck you for wanting to equate my helping a friend build their tent with someone selling bottled water.

My effort to give to another may be a useful and valued thing, but it is fundamentally different than a mass-produced item, or an effort of mine that I sell at a set or auctioned price. I give it because I want to give it, not because I want something in return. And there is where decommodification dovetails with gifting, which I’ve already written about. Once you refuse to sell the things that you have or buy the things that you need, the desire to share the things that you have and the ability to get the things that you need is still there. You get what you need and give what you have even when money, mass-production, trading, bidding, and the other trappings of what we think of when we think of commodification are removed from the equation. How fucking awesome is that?

My clearest example of this was at Alchemy 2008, when I was living out of my van. I only owned the barest minimum of things – only what fit in a van. I was beyond poor; I was closer to destitute. However, since my van was my whole house, I had a lot of items with me that other people didn’t. All week, I found myself giving away toilet paper, batteries, kitchenware, and other random items. I was not overflowing in riches, yet in an environment that didn’t try to sell to me and didn’t try to buy from me, I felt a constant desire to share what I had with those that wanted it.

Now that is a valuable and useful thing.

Here’s a crazy Photoshop contest (h/t) where the faces of celebrities are right-side up while the rest of them is turned upside down. Who thinks of these things?! I’m glad they do!  :-) If this image makes you grin (instead of driving you crazy!) click through to view pages and pages more!