keep a tangerine_now journal here on 43T for a while

There has been debates about global pollution for ages. I remember when I was in basic school (K-12) I was going around the neighbourhood to collect for Greenpeace. Those days it was still about plastic in the oceans that killed the whales and of course the ozone layer.

Nowadays the focus of the debate seems to have shifted almost entirely to the question of global warming. Does our consumerism and oil addiction affect climate change or not? It is still undecided and it seems that with the current political efforts we will be finding out in a few years time because sure as heck nothing is really going to change anyway.

The focus on climate change, and particularly the undecided nature of it, seems to me to have another nice advantage for anyone wanting to stall or make a few bucks selling oil. By feeding the confusion about global warming the focus is dragged away almost entirely from the other effects of pollution.

I mean, who talks about air pollution and plastic in the sea these days? Who cares? There seems to be an attitude of “look I’m not sure about this global warning so I can just go on driving my car one block down for every little thing and buying plastic shit I don’t need because it doesn’t matter anyway”.

I’m not so sure. Actually I’m not sure at all.

What matters to me is that burning oil and polluting the earth in other ways is not beneficial to our living environment, whether that means climate change or not. Does nobody care anymore that by using up fossil fuels we are polluting our own air, water, soil?

Warm or cold: clean water is becoming scarce. Warm or cold: people are getting sick from air pollution. At the very least it is ruining some stunning vistas, as I have seen in the US. Warm or cold: the oceans are becoming really empty because fish are not coming back. Warm or cold: our cows are eating the rainforests. Warm or cold: biodiversity is decreasing rapidly, maybe species are dying that are essential for our survival on the planet. All this is happening while people are nitpicking over which lobbyists are right.

I’m just thinking that yes it is important to know whether your heating is broken or not. But that’s still no reason to turn your home into a pigsty. That causes depression and disease.

Or am I completely wrong?
Could be.

part 1
and
part 2
and
part 3

Happy New Year!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mAAgeMis_U

It is a strange post for me because I’m not that much of a sucker for soccer (ahem… FOOTBALL!) but gods, even I see the beauty in these moves! A friend of mine posted this on facebook, along with the following:

“Holland’s best football player ever, Dennis Bergkamp, is still vividly remembered by his Arsenal fans. They’ve just voted his outstanding strike in 2002 at Newcastle as the Gunners’ Greatest Goal, as Arsenal’s Best of the Decade. In this video you can watch this goal at/from 2min06sec. The complete video gives ample proof of the Dutch legend’s bulging portfolio of classic goals. The masterpiece at Newcastle is one of those that sums up the vision, speed of thought, deftness of touch and clinical finishing that Bergkamp brought to Arsenal for more than a decade. Decide for yourself if this was his best goal or only one of his very best…”

Some time ago I posted a question about my budgies on a budgie forum. I am a little worried that the missus keeps dropping eggs and spends so much time in the nesting block. I’m afraid the eggs will exhaust her. I explained the situation on the forum and now I see that many people have read it, but nobody responds. It is like nobody knows what to do either. Aw… I do hope I get some advice. I can’t find anything about it elsewhere. :-(

Found this picture and liked it. :)

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For those of you unawares of the fact: I am doing NaNoWriMo this year. I heard about it last year from Smartstuff who, as you can see from her current tagline, is also participating this year.

It looks like I am going to make it.

At first I thought it was a maniac plan to attempt to write 50,000 words in a month. I still think it is although not as maniac as I thought. I wrote every time I was on the train to work and back. I wrote at home, trying very hard not to be distracted by other things (and my guy – even though he tried very hard not to). I wrote at Gary’s Deli where I was comfortably typing away while enjoying soup and bagles – secretly envisioning myself as a new J.K.Rowling writing her success story in a local coffee shop. ;-)

Now I am at 48,498 words out of 50,000. Not there yet but almost. I will make it.

This is a big deal for me. Let me try to explain why.

The past years have been filled with disappointment for me. The strain I put on myself was considerable and the result of that has been that I have not been able to complete anything in the past years, at least not anything I wanted to complete, or at least not to my own satisfaction. This is not a good feeling, I can assure you. Completing this relatively simple task – even though it is megalomania of a sort, the task to write a certain number of words each day is not especially complex – will to me at least be an accomplishment I can be proud of.

Another reason is this. I have been told by several people over the past years, as I was struggling with myself and the role I will play in the world, that at some point I would write a book. This is remarkable because none of those people, as far as I know, has ever read anything I wrote. Yet each of them was convinced. Much more than me myself, I admit. I did not think I could ever pull it off. After all, I never complete anything do I?

Do I?

After so much frustration and a restless feeling of wanting to create something but not feeling that I would be able to make anything… I have found my way of creating something.

Aw shit, I’m going to cry over NaNo tomorrow.

an unexplicable sense of love today. Good feeling.

Yesterday evening I celebrated my birthday by going to a concert with a group of people. There were ten of us and that included my parents and my father in law, plus of course my man. The concert was great fun and I enjoyed listening to music that was all new to me. This was true for everybody in the group because nobody knew the artist in advance. I had sent them a link to his MySpace but nobody had checked it out and also it turned out that his stage performance was much more rocky than his recorded stuff. That was a pleasant surprise.

One of the party was my former friend N of whom I also spoke earlier this week. She would be the person who hates it when I am/act confident. My man (who has known her longer than me) and me strongly suspect it has a lot to do with how she very rigidly tries to hold on to a certain vision of the world and herself in it – and therefore dismisses everything that disturbs this image. Since I don’t care about status or earning big wallops of cash or if my activities in the world are cool enough to report about, I don’t quite fit in her imagined framework. Too bad, peanut spread. (Also she holds grudges like nobody else I know and since we kept speaking with her man when he cheated on her… Hey, he was our friend too and he needed someone to talk to in all his emotional confusion. What were we going to do? Send him away? No.) She was the only one who said after the concert “Meh, it was really not my kind of band”. Well, sorry to hear it.

What was lovely, was that two of my friends stuck around for a bit after the concert. They did not know each other in advance but got along well. One of them has recently broken off her relationship which left her crushed. She had called me in the afternoon to apologize in advance for being bland and leaving early in the evening because she was sure to be tired and sad. As I said, she stayed around and we had a great time. I am so glad she still came to my birthday concert thingy. As a result, the three of us are going to another concert this coming Saturday.

During the evening I drank some wine. This may not be very significant to anyone reading this but to me it is. I am trying to get pregnant and actually in the middle of a clinic-assisted attempt. In earlier attempts I never drank a drop of alcohol during those two Weeks of Waiting and also no cafeine whatsoever. Now I did.

Why?

It is not because I have decided to be more relaxed about it because telling yourself, or anyone else, to be more relaxed about it is probably as dumb an advice as anyone can come up with. (When has saying “Don’t be stressed!” ever calmed anyone down?) The real reason is that I already know that the attempt failed. Which is sad. I know this because I felt the same stings in my belly as every time before, two days after the implantation. (Which was on my birthday so I had to swallow a bit to keep smiling but I was okay.) And also because of what I suppose I should call instinct. I am not feeling crushed about it, just a tad sad. I guess I did a lot of mourning already.

And so I am sitting here with my little can of coke. A little one not because of the cafeine content but because of the sugar: if that belly does not grow it needs to go. And this evening I will drink some of the port wine my friends brought me from Portugal and gifted to me yesterday. I will drink it while watching a movie (probably Harry Potter) and wearing either my new Star Wars t-shirt or the t-shirt my brother in law sent me for my birthday. It says: “You can’t see me. I’m a NINJA!” I love it.

I googled A. today.

Gasp!

MY GODS, HE’S GORGEOUS!

Guess I had a good eye for it, eh?