I write this post a little bit numb. My girlfriend and I are facing some pretty hard times.

Becki is incredibly close to her family. We make a point to head down to Wales once every three weeks or so, because she feels that she needs to make contact with the clan… especially her mother. Her relationship to her mother is very important to her.

So, two weeks ago, when her mother was in the hospital with suspected gallstones, Becki was understandably worried. I told her that gallstones aren’t life threatening, that there are ways to break the stones up or remove them with surgery, so her mother would be back to normal in no time at all. All they needed to do was run a few tests and confirm the diagnosis before they put her through some routine, painless treatment.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t gallstones. It was pancreatic cancer.

I won’t go into details about the diagnosis, save to underline the fact that it is a very serious one. Pancreatic cancer is rare, and it is especially dangerous because it displays no symptoms until it’s at an advanced stage, which is what happened here. It was all incredibly sudden. A month ago, she was her usual self. All of a sudden, she has cancer at an advanced stage. It’s terrifying.

This is all sort of unprecedented for me. I’m fond of her – not just because she’s a good person, but also because she’s so important to my one-and-only. I see a lot of her in Becki, and I’m frightened for her. I’m frightened for her whole family. I don’t know what to do or how to respond, and I feel certain that this tragedy will come to define the next several months, even if everything goes as well as can be expected.

It’s inspiring to see everyone pull together to get behind her for this. The phone over there has been ringing off the hook with well-wishers, and we have enough Welsh Cakes to feed an American family for like forty minutes. People are over constantly to see how she’s doing and keep her company. Becki, her brothers, and all of their partners – numbering six in total, including myself – have all teamed up to take care of the cooking, the washing up, and other various household chores. Everyone’s come together to help keep things normal and fight this thing.

It’s hard to watch. It’s difficult to see Becki go through it, and it’s almost too strange to accept as real. I’ve never experienced anything like this myself and can’t even imagine what it’s like for her. It’s not the sort of thing that you can make better with enough comforting words and cuddles. I feel pretty much rudderless and have no idea what to do. There isn’t really anything I can do but hold her and not let go.

It’s only going to get worse – even if all goes well, and they can shrink the tumor with chemo, it’s going to be an immense challenge for all of us over the next several months.

I mentioned earlier that it’s hard to accept as real. It’s like that for all of us, not just me – most days, Becki and I just go about our usual business. I practice drawing, write, go to work. She exercises and tries to manage her own insane workload. We laugh, tell jokes, and do all of the things that we ordinarily do. Then, often in the evenings, she’ll remember. She’ll cry and I’ll hold her, and it’s awful.

It’s also difficult to accept that there’s little we can do. We can do some cooking and cleaning for the family and keep her mother company. We can try to keep her spirits high. We can be there for support. But the hard battle is something she’ll have to go through on her own.

I’m in Gloucester, now, working as usual. So is Becki. I can’t help but feel like we should be down there, and I know Becki feels the same. Yet we can’t just abandon our lives, and the time off we have to spare is limited. Our employers are understanding, but it wouldn’t be fair of us to take a solid month off and still expect money. Besides, there’s little we can do right now. We’re still spending as much time as possible in Wales with her family, yet I often wonder if it’s enough. I feel real pangs of guilt over this. I almost feel like we should just drop everything and be there for the next several weeks, even though the reality is that it won’t solve anything. I feel like if we don’t, we’ll regret it.

I feel a lot of things. Above all, though, I feel fear. It is a general sense of foreboding that waxes and wanes, but never vanishes.

The worst part is that Becki’s mother is fairly young at just over 50. She had no risk factors – she doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink, no drugs, nothing like that. This came out of nowhere.

Ask your parents to get themselves checked out. I did. I’d hate for this to happen to anyone else.

Why do we hate fat people so much?

I see this discussion come up from time to time in the dark corners of the internet I frequent. It’s seen as somewhat acceptable to ridicule the obese in a way that society wouldn’t permit for other minorities. You can’t control who your ancestors were, what your sexual orientation is, or what gender you were born with, but you do have power over what food you put into your bodies and how much of it you eat. Therefore, obesity is a choice, and ridicule is more acceptable to society if your ‘condition’ is something you have control over. The other side of the debate takes exception to this, claiming that fat haters are lacking in empathy and have no idea what it’s like to live with a ‘food addiction,’ and occasionally even go so far as to state that obesity is a disability that warrants special treatment by society and subsidized care from the taxpayers.

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I was having a discussion with my girlfriend the other day as we drove back to our place. The topic: “How do I change peoples’ attitudes and behaviors with regard to waste?” It’s a subject dear to her heart. She is, after all, a Sustainability Consultant by trade.

Let’s face it. Our society is inherently wasteful. We live in a culture where pulling oil from the ground, making plastic from it, shipping the raw materials to a factory, manufacturing a new plastic spoon, and sending it to the consumer to be used once before being thrown away is seen as less effort than washing your spoon and using it again. My girl has always been sort of disgusted by this attitude, and trying to change it in the companies she’s employed with is her job. So the story of the single-use spoon is one that keeps her up at night. From time to time, we’ll talk about it and solve the world’s problems in conversation. It’s fun. Anyone who has ever had a circlejerk political discussion with likeminded friends knows what I’m talking about.

Anyway, while we were talking, I had a bit of an epiphany. Sustainability Greens are the Linux nerds of environmental science.

Bear with me, here.

Linux has a lot going for it. It’s useful, it’s free and open source, it’s quite customizable, and it’s quite efficient when it comes to utilizing the system resources. In short, for those in the know, it’s pretty much better than Windows at most things, and it costs absolutely nothing to use. Yet it has a tiny shred of the market share by comparison. Why don’t more people use Linux, then? A couple months ago, I witnessed a discussion on this very topic unfold. One user made a damned good point that agrees with my experiences as a new user of Linux. It went something like this – please forgive my paraphrasing:

“Linux isn’t as popular as Windows because it’s a lot harder to use. I think you guys are overestimating the level of tech proficiency in the general population of computer users. Have you used the latest version of Windows? It caters to that market. The average user never has to open the command line in Windows. That’s why it’s more popular.”

Obviously, this heretic was burned at the stake before he could back up his points. Fans of the OS attacked his argument on all fronts, but the general consensus of the opposition was something like “It’s not hard to use. You’re just stupid.”

I disagree. Once you open the command line, you’ve crossed the border into territory that’s far too frightening and complex for the average user to keep at it. Sure, they probably could learn what to do if they really tried. But they won’t – they’ll reboot their computers into Windows. The end result is that you get to feel smug and self-superior, but Linux keeps its small market share. This kind of thing is fine for Linux, which continues to thrive even though the vast majority of computer users don’t even know what it is, but this just isn’t acceptable for something as vital as Sustainability.

The “It’s not hard to do. You’re just stupid.” mentality definitely does exist in Sustainability and Environmentalism. In our car-ride conversation, I brought up the example of recycling to highlight the importance of simplicity at the user end.

Recycling is a simple concept. The products you use are made of resources that still have value even after the product itself ceases to be useful, and recycling is the process by which these resources are recovered. The alternative to recycling is the landfill. The idea of the landfill is also a simple one – you take everything in the bin and you put it in a pile on some undesirable scrap of land. You continue to do this until you run out of space, at which point you need to find another landfill. Which of these options is the environmentally friendly one? The answer should be obvious like the bleached-blonde hair on a girl’s upper lip.

Yet not everyone recycles. Recycling isn’t compulsory, and a lot of recyclable materials end up heaped in the landfill. Why? Why would people deliberately choose to waste things? How do we get them to change?

The answers to this are varied, and the focus tends to be on changing peoples’ attitudes, making them care, and ‘making Green sexy.’ Sustainability Greens will have their work cut out for them if this is the path they pick. It is not easy to get people off of the path of least resistance by rhetorical argument alone. You have to create a compelling message, get people to listen to it and agree with it, and hope that it’s enough to change peoples’ actions. It is extremely difficult to do this intentionally and reliably.

Behavior Change is hard. It’s pretty damned difficult to achieve on your own, when you have a real desire for it. Have you ever tried to lose weight, quit smoking, or stop biting your nails? It’s tough. Succeeding on a grand scale with a passive audience is far more challenging than that.

I think that the interested parties are approaching the problem in the wrong way. The immediate solution is not to make people care more, it’s to improve and simplify the end user’s participation in the desired behavior.

Back to Recycling.

When someone has an item that they want to be rid of, they have two solutions to choose between. One of these is easy, and one of these is hard.

The easy solution is to throw it in the bin, which takes all of two seconds – perhaps as many as ten if you try to toss it in basketball style and miss the shot. You might feel a little bit of guilt at sentencing that plastic bottle to death by slow decomposition in a landfill, but this will be short-lived.

Recycling is the hard solution. It requires more labor and specialist knowledge of the rules. You need to know what bin it belongs in, of course, but it’s more complicated than that. Is the item you’re trying to dispose of cardboard? Yeah, we can take that. Unless it’s been exposed to food, in which case, we can’t. Wait, is it corrugated? Go ahead, look it up. I’ll wait. Is it? Yes? Tough break, to the landfill it goes. Got any plastic? Is it the right plastic number? Because we can only take certain numbers, you know, and we also expect you to sort by color. Whoa, are you trying to recycle yogurt pots? Shit, man, what are you trying to do, kill us all? You can’t recycle those! What do you mean, ‘How is that any different to my plastic soup containers?’ It just is! Oh, cider bottles are glass. We can take those, if they’re the right color. But wait… the top is still on it, and that’s metal. Do you need to take that off and put that in the right bin? Wait, what if it touched food? What if I get this wrong? Will that sentence the whole bin to the landfill? Okay, cool, now we’re all sorted on the rules. We can now recycle all the time. Except, wait, you’re moving to a new town? Sorry, you need to learn all the rules and guidelines again. It’s mostly the same, except… you know what? Fuck it, just throw it out.

Ahem.

My point is that people don’t see ‘waste’ and ‘recycle’ when they’re trying to dispose of things. They see an easy option and a hard option. They pick the easy option. Why can’t everything go into a single bin, to be sorted at the plant? Why can’t we recycle some things that have touched food, but not others? Why can’t we have standardized rules for it across the country? If you want more people to recycle, you need to make recycling easy.

The response to this? “It’s not hard. You’re just stupid.”

While that’s true, it doesn’t solve the problem.

So alternate worlds, accessible by portals or somesuch other Clarke’s law tech, have become something of a cliche in Fantasy and Science Fiction. If you’re on this blog, then you almost certainly know what I’m talking about. The idea is that every time you make a decision, another world plays out from that point. Except in this one, you made the other decision, and your life proceeds from there. Across many other worlds-slash-dimensions, then, there are zillions of other Edward Clarks out there who have made other life choices and are currently existing in a vastly different set of circumstances. In one, I might have majored in Employment and be happily running away on the hamster wheel of my chosen career path. In another, I might be a homeless Meth addict. It’s interesting enough to think about – how would my life be different if I’d made another choice along the way? Would it be better? Worse?

A related question: If you could go back in time and make another choice, would you?

For me, the answer to this question is no. I like my life and I like where it’s going. Reading lots of science fiction has me paranoid that making a seemingly minor choice will have major consequences in my life later on, and I wouldn’t want to risk fucking up my perfectly good life by choosing not to tattle on Charlie Eelman for putting acorns in the urinal in the 5th grade. I’m not entirely sure how my choice to whine to the teacher about this prevented me from becoming a smack addict, but hey, who am I to think that I could meddle with causality and make things turn out ‘better?’ It’s not worth the potential risk of getting played by Ashton Kutcher in the film adaptation.

Anyway, rather than dissect Mr. Kutcher’s cautionary tale on the subject, what prompted this post was my reflection on a pair of life decisions that completely changed the course of my future and have come to define me for the last two years. These were two Moments of Truth, where I was faced with a difficult decision and could have gone one way or the other on either of them. My choices at these junctures have had a profound effect on my life and relationship.

The first came around graduation in 2008. I was still living in Britain. It was a few days before the ceremony, at which point I would be given my degree in Psychology as well as a handshake and a formal request to GTFO and go back to my country of origin. My plan was to move out to Idaho for a year after I graduated and cut my teeth in the real world there. There was just one problem. I was in love with a British girl, one of my friends throughout university, and she did not know it. I had lived with her and a few other friends in my fourth year at St. Andrews, and though I had known her for more than three years at that point, I’d only been harboring romantic feelings for her for a few months.

It was still a few days before my parents came out to see me, so we were hanging out in her apartment in Edinburgh to pass the time. We went out to dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe that night, but it wasn’t really a date. Because we were friends and had been for years, the whole affair could be explained that way if I decided to pussy out and keep my feelings a secret. That was my choice. I had resolved to tell her how I felt about her that evening, yet my defensive subconscious had been engaged in a guerilla war with my mind for hours leading up to the event as it tried to convince me not to put my self esteem at risk. Because it was at risk. I had been dropping hints since the beginning of the summer, but she had not responded to them in ways that I could call favorable. If she did feel the same way, she did not show it. So I did not think the odds of her reciprocating my affection were very high at all. If that were the case, why confess it in the first place? Doing so could put up a barrier between us and risk what had been, up to then, an awesome friendship. Why risk ruining that if I didn’t think she felt that way about me?

Because she deserved the truth, and because I knew I’d regret it forever if I didn’t. This was my best shot. If I chose not to show her my hand then, I would leave the country soon afterwards and possibly never get another opportunity. I wanted to tell her, yet it was extremely frightening. I did not know how she would react, and I had convinced myself that it would not be favorable. ‘I’m flattered but don’t feel the same way’ was, I thought, the best I could hope for. If I chose to confess my feelings, it would be my Pickett’s Charge – brave, yet foolish and perhaps futile.

But I found my courage, somehow, and I told her. It shocked her. She felt the same way. We spent the night cuddling on her bare bed, using an oversized towel for a blanket. I was absolutely astonished – it was everything I hoped for and the last thing I expected.

It could have easily gone the other way. In some other universe, I chose not to tell her, and I slowly lost touch with her over the next several months. I pity that other me. I wish that he’d found his bravery. Now, he probably plays World of Warcraft and is still wondering just what the hell he’s going to do with his life. Maybe he has some direction, but he’s not entirely certain of it. He definitely regrets his decision to keep his thoughts to himself that fateful evening in Edinburgh, because he probably isn’t truly happy.

Another similar day came later that year. I did end up going back to the States, because my visa expired and I had to go home and apply for a new one. I went to Idaho as planned, got a crappy job, and worked while I waited for it to go through. Long distance relationships don’t come with a training manual. A couple of things made this difficult. Firstly, there is a seven hour time difference between Idaho and Britain. This means that it’s hard to stay in touch as a couple if you both work. The timezones meant that when her work hours were ending, mine were just beginning and when mine were ending, she was asleep. If I didn’t specifically pick a schedule that would allow us to talk to each other, the awful truth is that we may not have made it.

Anyway, I was an idiot about it for a while. I’d fail to respond to IMs. I’d go for a day or more without talking to her because our time slots just wouldn’t line up. I didn’t realize at the time that in a relationship, regular contact is incredibly important. It’s not enough to chat to each other once in a while on IMs or send emails every other day. You need to get as close to face-to-face as possible – video chat, or at least voice chat. And it needs to be regular. I didn’t realize it at the time, but by doing these things and failing to follow through, I was really hurting her.

One day, she called me. She was in tears. She was about to come out for six weeks, and while we were both quite excited about this, she was worried that I was losing interest. She didn’t want to come out and live in a foreign country for a month and a half just to have this fall apart. She told me that it would break her heart. If that’s what I thought was going to happen, she said, then she might as well cancel the trip.

While she was talking, I started to see how my behavior was affecting her. I started to see that I’d wounded her, that I was continuing to hurt her. I was ashamed. I still feel ashamed as I write this, even now. She asked me a direct question: did we have what it takes? Was it worth risking her heart to come out here? A craven part of me wanted to tell her that I wasn’t sure. That maybe we should hold off, that maybe this wouldn’t work out. Because what we were about to do was risky. We hadn’t been dating for very long, and she was about to move in with me for six weeks – unfortunately, when you’re young, poor, and live thousands of miles away, you don’t have the resources to indulge in half measures like keeping separate places while you feel each other out. Part of me did not want to risk it. I didn’t know whether things would work out or not, and taking that chance seemed frightening.

But despite that fear, I urged her to come out. I’d started to see where I was screwing up and assured her that I could change, and that all we needed was time together and we could make it work. It wasn’t the safe option for either of us, but we decided to take the plunge and see if we could fall in love. We had a great time over those six weeks. We were just as compatible as I remembered. We made a schedule and stuck to it, too, and we managed to keep the relationship alive and healthy long enough for my visa to be approved.

But somewhere, in another universe, there is a version of me that chose the safe path and missed out on a wonderful, fulfilling journey over the next few years. Maybe he still works that shitty job in Ketchum. Maybe he ended up overstaying his welcome in Idaho, or maybe he ended up moving on and setting out on his own after all. I hope he’s doing well. I hope both of them are, in fact.

Though I do pity them.

Sometimes, it keeps me awake at night to think about how close I came to being those guys. I got lucky, I often think to myself. Though those decisions have been made, and everything turned out for the best, it is still not comforting to me to know that so much of the happiness that I now take for granted is the result of two small, almost whimsical acts of courage and a great deal of luck. In these moments, I’ll look over at the beautiful woman sleeping next to me, kiss her on the cheek, and promise myself that I won’t ever take her for granted. I’ll never let myself forget how close I came to never being with her at all.

I love you, Becki. Happy Valentine’s Day.

I consider myself an environmentalist. I get a little uncomfortable talking about this, because it falls within the ‘value’ category for me, and experience has taught me that whenever someone mentions the V-Word, they are also about to suggest forcing conformity on anyone who disagrees. But the truth is, that’s how I feel about this issue. I enjoy the outdoors and want the scenic beauty of America to still be there for the next generation. Theodore Roosevelt is probably my favorite US president. I willingly pay extra for products that don’t cost the earth. I think any political candidate without a solid alternative energy plan is by definition unqualified. Et cetera, et cetera…

I also have the good fortune to live in a democratic, capitalist society. My vote is not my only tool for changing the world around me. I have my income, as well. The dollars I spend toward the products I buy are little votes for the sort of world I want to live in. They represent economic demand which directly affects the profits and prevalence of the brands I choose to buy. I’m not much of an activist – I’m not in the habit of joining street protests. But I’ll happily use my dollar to support businesses that choose to adhere to practices that support my values.

This is harder than it sounds.

For one, there’s a general lack of transparency about this issue. Companies that produce products are not obligated to provide information about their business practices on their labels. If they are cutting corners, then, they can simply choose not to tell you. Why would a clothing company tell you that this shirt they’re marketing was produced with child labor if they don’t absolutely have to? Would a poultry farm mention the fact that their chickens were raised in startlingly inhumane battery farm conditions as you’re trying to choose between products at the grocery store? Of course not. There is no facts label for the environmental/animal damage or human rights abuses associated with each product like there is for nutritional information.

There is also a great deal of obfuscation. There are a lot of people like me out there – people who care about the environment and human rights, people who don’t want to give money to companies who cut corners and sustain abuses, yet who are also less than rigorous in their research methods in figuring out who’s worth spending money on and who isn’t. Therefore, there is quite a lot of money to be made by continuing to pollute or abuse human beings while using marketing voodoo to convince potential customers that you are a socially responsible goods and services provider. This is called ‘Greenwashing’ by the sustainability crowd.

The point is that it’s hard to even start walking the walk when it comes to green issues.  Companies can hide their dirty laundry behind this total lack of information, and they invest quite a bit in obfuscating the issue to keep potential customers confused. After all, most people wouldn’t voluntarily choose to buy clothing made by sweatshop labor. Most people would not want to buy from a company that is actively and without apology damaging the environment to save a few dollars. But at the end of the day, what the customers really care about is putting clothes on their backs and food on their tables. That’s why they’re trying to part with their hard-earned dollars in the first place. When you’re actually in the aisle comparing products, it’s hard to tell which supports your values and which don’t.

Hell, it’s hard for me, and I actually give a shit. I probably own clothes that were made by exploited human beings, and I’ve almost certainly eaten delicious meat made from poorly-treated animals.

(These ideas are not originally mine, nor are they particularly new. The only cure for these things is information. The more knowledge you arm yourself with as you go shopping, the better. Thanks to the magic of the internet, the information is available. The fruit of knowledge is low-hanging. All you have to do is reach out and grab it.

But wouldn’t it be nice if there was a resource available to categorize and rank everyday products you might want to buy? I submit to you The Better World Shopper. First found this little book while working at Iconoclast Books in Ketchum for a year, and it’s a neat little pocket guide that covers a surprising amount of products. The website is better, more detailed, and more frequently updated.)

A lack of transparency isn’t the only thing that makes it hard to be green.

Let’s be honest. Recycled or Environmentally Friendly products are often crappy products. If you take a sheet of recycled paper towel, look at it with narrowed eyes so it knows you mean business, and whisper “I’m going to take you to a spill, now” in a threatening tone, it will completely fall apart. Using environmentally friendly washing machine tablets actually makes the dirty dishes laugh. Eco cleaning products have a reputation for not doing their job. There are exceptions to this – Method makes excellent cleaning products, and we buy them where we can find them. Their laundry detergent is especially good. But for the most part, the classical, screw-the-planet alternatives are just plain better.

I think this is because many companies offer eco products for the wrong reasons. They want to tap into the market of slightly-concerned consumers – people like me who care enough to base purchasing decisions around that, but not enough to spend hours googling everything I buy. So, they take things just far enough to put environmentally-friendly imagery on their labels and that’s that. They just want your dollar.

The trick is to find the few that actually are worth your cash and compensate where green products just don’t work. I hate recycled paper towels, so we’ve stopped using them entirely. We just use actual towels, now, and wash them when we run out.

Also, it seems to me that comfort is wasteful. Automotive transportation, for instance, is an inherently prodigal endeavor. Any time we drive somewhere we don’t have to, we’re essentially throwing away money. I’m fine with walking everywhere, so this is no issue. The worst of it comes in the winter months, when my desire to not freeze to death in my own home comes into conflict with my SO’s desire to stop wasting energy. Me, I like to be warm. If I can’t take my jacket off in my own home, it is not warm enough. She’s a harder-core Green than me, though, and her philosophy is that if my piss isn’t freezing before it gets to the toilet, the radiator stays off, thank-you-very-much.

(Yes, I’m exaggerating. Please don’t kill me, honey.)

We also own a Bokashi Bin for breaking rapidly composting our food waste, as well as a container of worms for further processing it. We use the soil this creates to raise plants on the balcony (though we have yet to achieve real success there – no edible success, that is). Sounds great, in theory. In practice, the bokashi bin has the sweet aroma of an open-air sewer, and I only keep it in the house to indulge my lovely partner. I’m just thankful that its seal is airtight, so it gives off no stink unless we’re putting food in it. (Incidentally, however, it does do a damned good job of breaking our leftovers down, and has cut down on our food waste quite a lot.)

Anyway, as I write this – there is a point, I swear – I’m taking the temperature of the green movement as I see it right now, and I’m coming to the conclusion that we’re just not there yet.

Hard Greens often make the argument that ‘good lives don’t have to cost the Earth,’ but I’m not sure that’s true. It seems to me that the only way they can make that point stand is to dramatically redefine what a ‘good life’ is. Sure, there’s a lot of fat you can trim. You can drive less, take the stairs instead of the elevator, eat better and healthier, buy locally to cut down on food mileage. You can be perfectly happy living a carbon neutral life, they say. They’re right. To a point. But comfort does cost, and while you can eschew some comfort and still live well, people will not want to do this. Working to maximize your personal comfort is the whole idea of the capitalist system, isn’t it? As long as getting beyond this this is the mantra of the movement, it will always be on the fringe. People will nod their heads and agree that making some lifestyle change is probably a good idea, but when they actually go shopping, they’ll go with the products that actually work and make their lives better.

This is where the green movement fails, I think. Capitalism does not think or reason. You can’t set it aside, explain to it that some of the things it’s doing are harming the environment, and get it to stop. You’d have to make this argument millions of times, once for every consumer cell that makes up the whole organism. And not every one will buy into what you’re saying. The best way to make real changes is to make green products that are equal to or better than their non-green counterparts. Do that and people will pick those products without any cajoling whatsoever.

Instead, the prevailing attitude appears to be ‘make the bad behaviors illegal.’ This does have its place. You can’t really fix human or animal rights abuses by improving on the alternative products. But greens have to understand that to the average consumer, their lives get more expensive and less ‘good’ every time this happens. Of course they’ll resist the idea. As long as this is the party line, they always will. Since we live in a democracy, this resistance translates into legislative inaction on green issues.

But I’m optimistic. Green products are getting better all the time, at least in Britain. They seem to be going in the right direction with this stuff, finally. One hopes that in the near future, being green will feel less like self-flagellation, and smug superiority will not be the only comfort I take from trying to do right by the environment with my purchases.

(Yes. Exaggerating again, please don’t kill me, love!)

I’ve just gotten back from a four-day trip to Edinburgh this weekend. Becki loves that place just as I adore Sun Valley – it was the site of her first job out of college, where she got her first taste of independence and adulthood. It was a pleasure to watch her excitement leading up to our first day there, and it was great to see the city with someone who had local knowledge of the area.

Of course, it also meant charging through one of the hilliest cities in Britain at a relentless pace for several hours. My legs and I still aren’t on speaking terms. My friend Kelly walks as if she is being chased by a Shoggoth at all times. Her normal walking speed is just a hair slower than jogging, even on the steep bits. So, right now, I’m utterly knackered, though I did have a good trip.

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Today, I am feeling smug and self satisfied.

I had an excellent day. I’m enjoying the hell out of my new job, even though at this point it is not so new. I’m working under this awesome Irishwoman who’s over fifty and curses like a sailor. I’d be put off by it if she weren’t so f$%£ing nice, and her accent makes the most vile of obscenities sound like a compliment. I am there to make their database more efficient and evaluate/reorganize their websites to make them more friendly to users and search engines. I also do a lot of computer troubleshooting around the office, because it saves them a lot of money and is really, really useful.

So, today, one of our websites was flagged as an attack site by Google. Somehow, their site had gotten hacked over the weekend, and now featured a malicious <script> block at the bottom of the page. Google, being a wise and vengeful sort of deity, does not stand for that crap and marked the site as hostile. Anyone with a web browser other than Internet Explorer or half-decent virus protection either couldn’t view the site at all or got a big, red ‘this site will steal your identity’ warning on entry, thus making our business’ web presence invisible to anyone who hadn’t already failed the internet. Obviously, this was very, very scary and bad for the people I worked with, who all secretly believe that information technology is an arcane discipline that cannot be used or understood without a virgin sacrifice, a smattering of haruspicy, and a seance. They were frightened and had no idea what to do.

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Faith in humanity is a fragile thing. Whenever I actively look for it, I find it quite easy to discover instances of my fellow humans acting like assholes toward one another. This is hardly news. We don’t even bat our eyelashes when we hear about it, because it is the norm. We are hardened to it. I can therefore weather most of these instances without having our faith in humanity shaken except in the most extreme cases. Many of life’s reminders that humans can suck bounce off my nigh-impervious Armor of Cynicism.

But I am from a very special place, a circle of Hell so frightening that Dante Alighieri trembled with terror at the thought of committing a description of it to page. It is a place of noxious air, of cruel, hardy denizens, and of mean, gritty streets. The demonic taint of those who live there runs deep, the harsh reality of their continued survival in this accursed place a source of strange pride. I look back on my time imprisoned there and quake at the memories, wondering how I managed to survive for so long in such a wasteland.

I am speaking, of course, of New Jersey.

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(Warning: this post is something of a rant. If that’s not your thing, feel free to stop reading now. You won’t miss much.)

I was having a great day today. Got up, got writing done on the bus, made it to Cheltenham with time to spare to grab a coffee before work, had a fairly productive morning at the office. Had a great lunch – couscous salad, pesto chicken flatbread sandwich, strawberry smoothie from Marks & Spencer. Finished the day pretty strong – worked on my Chapter Summaries for the Ballad to send to my producer.

As days go, it was just past the right side of average. I was smiling and sending flirty texts to my girlfriend on the way home, even.

Then I got in and got my mail.

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