fresh start

So I now AM officially done with the work thing. To celebrate, I finally had my hair re-cut, re-dyed and re-shaved. Yay symbolic gestures. Ain't they grand?

So hopefully I will now be able to make some serious progress in many areas of my life. Keeping myself physically healthy will be a top priority so exercise and eating right are gonna be on tap every day. My mental health will improve as the weather gets better soon I'm sure. And the trip back to California for ten days to see so many wonderful circus arts friends AND perform for Harvey Mudd College should be quite refreshing and grounding as I start to muddle through the vision of performing for a living. My short-term goal is to get the groundwork laid for what the next several months will be like in the 9 or so days until I cross the country via the airways. Contacting some inspirational people from the past will be a first step (and one I will continue on the west coast) and a TON of brainstorming will be the fruits of my labor, I think. That will be tough for me to handle as it may not appear to be much progress or work that gets done in that short time but I am also working on being more satisfied with the little steps and small wonders in life. Ooh, multi-tasking: further the circus dream and make myself a more content person.

A random side-note is that I think everyone should check out Penn & Teller's Showtime series "Bullshit!" There are a ton of episodes on youtube and they tackle some fantastic topics ranging from the energy crisis and nuclear power to the death penalty to Mother Theresa/Gandhi/the Dali Lama to the war on drugs and even to abstinence. They basically take a controversial subject and get a representative (or two or three) from each side to explain some important aspects of the subject. Unfortunately, the hosts don't perform their very entertaining magic but they do plenty of amusing exchanges between ever-silent Teller and Penn. And Penn will call many people assholes each show. Good times.

But in any case, there was a 'what you eat' episode in which they attacked Greenpeace for stopping genetically-modified crops from being sent to countries with starvation issues. There were many hippies and raw-foodites to explain all the dangers and a few more scientific-folk to show how safe the crops were. It got me to thinking all those philosophical thoughts about a moral duty to help those in worse conditions (which, if you spoke to me during my time at Vassar, you'd know I believe strongly in after reading some very convincing philosophy assignments) and the ideas of 'survival of the fittest'/natural population control. Technology has allowed us to overcome a lot of the more basic traits that would have taken us out of the evolutionary picture (eyesight, allergies and birth defects are some of the many examples) and has been used as a defense for how we have adapted in a way to create a 'fitter' genetic group. But it's a damn tricky concept. Ending world hunger used to be a no-brainer to me, but when some arguments were presented to me in college I realized maybe that wasn't the whole story. We have too many people living in the world at the rate we are going and hunger, disease, and disaster act as means of curbing that growing population for the overall good of the planet. I don't know how to look at that. Is creating genetically modified food crop that will allow many millions of people to live right if we are not allowing them to live as they 'should'? Ie, can we use our 'genetically fit' trait of technology to eliminate one of the limiting factors of population growth? We may not understand how the modifications to the crops will affect their quality of life, affect the weather patterns and land quality (not to mention balance of the ecosystem with regards to other plant and animal species), but it WILL allow millions of people to live longer than they currently are. There is that very fierce part of my person that screams "YES, you save as many people as you can!" but we would be making currently un-farmed and overall poorly life-sustaining land into something it's not in a very short amount of time. Maybe we are not 'supposed to' be living in certain regions of the world with our current genetic make-up. Hell, maybe we aren't supposed to be living in cities in the fashion we do. My Crohns disease has opened my eyes to what we accept on a daily basis as 'healthy' or at least not detrimental in terms of food. We 'should' not be eating 90%+ of what most people in the US do from a genetic standpoint and it is beginning to show in the rise of heart disease, digestive disorders and cancer in the US. This is the crux of the matter: just because we TECHNOLOGICALLY can create food at a rate to cheaply and (from a taste standpoint, at least as we've been force-fed it and become accustomed to it) readily supply particular foods doesn't mean we GENETICALLY are able to properly digest that food. Just because we have used technology to inject vitamins into cardboard doesn't mean that we will receive those vitamins if we ingest that cardboard. So who's to say the genetically modified crops would not eventually create issues not just for the health of the people they feed but for the planet itself? A couple of years ago I would yell at anyone with that question but I am instead just stuck not knowing which side wins out anymore...

I miss academia...