In Media Res
http://newhomeeconomics.wordpress.com/
http://www.snarkmarket.com/
http://www.kottke.org/
http://www.amazon.com/Lifting-Depression-Neuroscientists-Hands-Activating/dp/0465037720/
My first link, NewHomeEconomics, is Jennifer Rensenbrink’s log of her experiments in …finding the intersection where saving money and reducing my carbon footprint meet
. I originally found her site as a part of the “new liberal arts” education discussion on Snarkmarket and similar to Jason Kottke’s site about the Liberal Arts 2.0, my favorite and most frequently checked site by several orders of magnitude.
The final selling point that led me to post here came with her latest entry, where she experiments with preparing and roasting a whole chicken, using the bones to make broth, and experimenting with fermentation in the form of sourdough starters and gingerbeer (I just learned to quarter and prepare my first whole chicken, have the bones frozen to try making broth, and had saved the link to the same sourdough starter tutorial she used). I’ve been interested for a while in reviving some of the lost arts and skills that our grandparents and ancestors used as part of their daily lives, skills which we have lost to convenience and mass production and industrialization, and which, quite possibly, we might have to use in the semi-near future. At the very least, I’m interested in skills that connect us more intimately with our own lives, food, communities, environment, etc. Call me a child of the Globalization/Industrialization backlash, a supporter of local, sustainable food systems, an interested observer of systems thinking/holistic thinking/ecological design/permaculture, and a supporter of re-skilling ourselves to take ownership of and responsibility for our existence on this planet. Call me conflicted and more talk than action, but at least I’m trying.
Don’t take me for an overly nostalgic “life was so much better back then” type. It just seems that all that “hard work” we’ve been replacing with ingenuity and machines and technology was more beneficial to us than we thought. I’ve been meaning to read Kelly Lambert’s Lifting Depression: A Neuroscientist’s Hands-On Approach to Activating Your Brain’s Healing Power. The gist that I’ve picked up is that our brain’s pleasure center is wired closely with areas controlling motor skills and planning/anticipation/expectation, and that by using our brains and body to set up and plan for constructive motor skill tasks, and then complete them, we fire and strengthen the pleasure centers in our brain, kind of an intrinsic “job well done, here’s your cookie” scenario. This could explain the correlation between the ever-rising rates of depression and our increasingly sedentary, computer/tv bound, convenience first lifestyles. Ergo, mowing the yard or cleaning your room or any of the many dreaded tasks from Dad’s school of “It Builds Character” inflicted on a typical young adult actually do more to make them happy or mentally satisfied in the long run than the “I want my child to have all the things that I didn’t have when I was growing up” school. Guess I should take that as my cue to get off my ass and go feed the compost bin.
Welcome to my blog, a protean receptacle for whatever interests me, likely related to topics mentioned above. Take it as you will, hope you enjoy.
I loved this: “Call me a child of the Globalization/Industrialization backlash, a supporter of local, sustainable food systems, an interested observer of systems thinking/holistic thinking/ecological design/permaculture, and a supporter of re-skilling ourselves to take ownership of and responsibility for our existence on this planet.”
I am really intrigued about Lambert’s book. When I first started bike commuting several years ago, I would feel super whiny on cold mornings, and I gave myself little pep talks about my Grandma and Grandpa and how they would still go out and plow fields or milk cows on cold mornings. It was rather silly, but still. I think there is something to this. The more I do the happier I am. Am I doing more because I’m happier or am I happier because I’m doing more? One thing’s for sure: I’m so exhausted every night that insomnia is not even remotely an issue.
My parents wouldn’t let me have a Nintendo when I was a kid even though I begged constantly. Now that I’m a parent, I have that decision and many others like it before me. I do not know which way I will go on many of them. Right now economics is actually making it rather easy to say no to just about everything, but the recession can’t last forever, can it? (Maybe it can? A rather sobering thought.)
Anyway, thanks for the kind words. You’ve given me a lot to think about with this post.