I'm obsessed with the end of the world, so both the idea of Alan Weisman's book The World Without Us and his cool interactive website feature fascinate me.
I'm sick today, and I have very little work to do. Thus all the blog updates. I wish I had my lozenges with anesthetic and my Dristan. Or, better yet, my couch and my remote.
I disappeared for a little while there, Internet. Sorry. I've been wrapped up in a new job. Fortunately, said new job ends this week, so really, you have not lost me for long. My blog is not the only thing that has been neglected. Facebook, my daily blog reads, and my plants (unwatered) feel your pain.
I was excited about everything, yesterday. I got a book to review and a design magazine I didn't subscribe to in the mail. (Who bought me the subscription to Dwell? Contact me for cookies.) But tonight I feel tired, and I got student loan documents in the mail, and I don't have appropriate change for coffee tomorrow, and what then, Internet? WHAT THEN? (I made tea at work today, but I hate tea. I hate how it's too hot for 15 minutes and then lukewarm for 2 hours. I hate how it doesn't have caffeine [or at least mine doesn't], and how it doesn't taste like chocolate [like my coffee always does]. I always end up dumping half of it out. Actually, the only thing I like about tea is the smell, which is why I sometimes make mandarin green tea at home just to let the smell fill my apartment.)
Also, I watched An Inconvenient Truth tonight with James. I enjoyed it, I guess, but it's discouraging. As much as I want to like Al Gore, I can't trust him--so much of this movie is just spin (the personal stuff, mostly, not the science, lest I arouse the fury of my fellow bleeding-heart liberal environmentalist compatriots). I honestly believe that the human race will wipe itself out, and I honestly think, sometimes, it would be better for the planet if we did it sooner rather than later. I'm not kidding. These thoughts occur to me, and I don't even feel bad about them. In fact, given my affection for end-of-the-world scenarios, I would say this constitutes the danger that Walter Benjamin warned us about, when "humankind's 'self-alienation reaches such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order." That doesn't mean we should do nothing--I certainly am not advocating that--but it does make it depressing, sometimes, to do something, anything. So in addition to the coffee-change problem, and the student-loan problem, I have the carbon-footprint-problem.
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Currently listening to: Regina Spektor - Fidelity
via FoxyTunes
Over Thanksgiving weekend, a friend recommended the Josh Ritter song "The Temptation of Adam," and I've been listening to it since, in my usual obsessive way. It's a love song for the end of the world, and thus, right up my alley.
I never had to learn to love her like I learned to love the Bomb
She just came along and started to ignore me
But as we waited for the Big One I started singing her my songs
And I think she started feeling something for me...
[...]
Oh Marie there's something tells me things just won't work out above
That our love would live a half-life on the surface
So at night while you are sleeping I hold you closer just because
As our time grows short I get a little nervous
I think about the Big One, W.W.I.I.I.
Would we ever really care the world had ended
You could hold me here forever like you're holding me tonight
I look at that great big red button and I'm tempted
From desire to inspire: books on display. I love pictures of other people's bookshelves, although I love them even more when you can tell what books they have. JUDGMENT!
George Orwell Wounded by a Fascist Sniper: George Orwell's essay about being shot. I have a weird fondness for George Orwell that goes back to high school. For a long time I had his 5 rules for effective writing posted like a prayer over my desk, until I realized I actually like using long words where short ones will do. Call it a hapless, perhaps misguided, attempt to gain the approbation of my readership.
It's not a secret holiday, is it? There is NO ONE ELSE in the office. It's suspicious. I'm pretty sure the world hasn't ended though (which is always my first assumption) because a workman just walked by my desk. So there must be something else going on... some kind of cool library breakfast I wasn't invited to? With pancakes and orange mocca frappucinos and collocation? Well, if no one else gets here by lunchtime I'm going home. Or I'll just spend the whole afternoon watching the otter cam.
List of secret holidays: Don't Tell Anyone Day (usually celebrated on the first Saturday after Christmas), Keep It Secret Week (Mar 1-7), 4/20 (April 20, obviously), Jocelyn Still Has To Go To Work Day (June 1st), Skull & Bones Day (which usually commemorates the day George Bush Sr. entered office), Shavuot (late May/early June), Taciturn Eve (it's not actually a secret, but it might as well be), Ssssssssh (Sometime in late August; no one knows for sure because it's not talked about).
Heh. It could actually be Shavuot. Insert tasteless joke about a Jewish library conspiracy here.
Besides the end of the world, I have some healthier obsessions, and one is correspondence. Thus, open letters, a website I just discovered. Particularly good are the letters by a woman who identifies herself as x, who writes to the absent father of her son about his adolescence. The author has since been revealed to be Winnipeg author Miriam Toews.
History of the Fisher Price airplane. "In 1951, Stalin had reiterated his call for "one of the toughest engineering problems facing our nation" -- a plane that could carry a dad, a mom, their family, and the dog to a playground in Irkutsk." Tee hee.
howtopedia is a new DIY resource site with projects and tips like "how to make chocolate," "what to do with tin cans," and "how to build a small wind turbine." Just yesterday, I had the urge to build a small wind turbine, but I didn't have the information I needed to do so. Plus, I immediately decided I would rather watch Medium.
hometown baghdad is an interesting documentary series on life in Iraq.
I collect websites about abandoned urban spaces. This is related to my obsession with the end of the world, or with apocalyptic events which pretty much put an end to humanity in general--an obsession which is strong enough to mean I even enjoyed watching The Day After Tomorrow. (As well as some better end-of-the-world obsessed things, like Douglas Coupland's Life After God.) Thus: urban curators, the vanishing point and abandoned places.
"The SCREAM meme suggests that we're so ironic that we can't even take our own apocalypse-- our lurking sense, on the eve of the future, of social disintegration and simmering discontent-- seriously. This is the moment Walter Benjamin warned us of, when humankind's 'self-alienation' reaches 'such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.'" -Fighting the Forces
"The dead rose! We should've at least had an assembly!" -Xander, Buffy
[from the archives]
ChangeThis: a site for depositing and displaying manifestoes. Sound fun? It is! I should write one about Lorne Gunter, global warming, the end of authenticity, modernity, and the end of the world. (Which would make me seem suitably crazy. People who write manifestoes are always crazy. I did not invent this rule.)
Sorry about our president: Americans aplogize to the rest of the world for electing the Head Dumbass. This co-incides with a Talking-To-Americans style video I watched yesterday in which various Americans agreed that they supported George Bush in his invasion of several different countries--each one being actually Australia mislabelled on a map. Note to the United States: the rest of the world hates you. This website seems like a step in the right direction.
File under projects: a literary clock. Make a clock out of a book! I like clocks, I like books, it makes sense.
