Water, Water Nowhere, Still Not a Drop to Drink

Looks like that teeth-rotting lovey-dovey part of February's behind us now. Whew. "Eff that," even, as people too lazy to pronounce entire curse words might say. "Eff that in the em-effin' ey." Those people are weird.

I'll have some longer ramblings for you later this week - just as you've all no doubt been dying for more of - but today? Environment talk and another meme! Put down that baseball bat - you're thrilled, damn it.

I wrote about this last fall, but I figured I'd post an update, just so we can all bask in the glory of what continued climate change is doing to the American southeast. (Unless you're surrounded by water like Florida. I'll get you yet, Florida, you and your awesome manatees.)

To recap, for a long time, we've been caught in this ongoing cycle - every summer we enter drought conditions, and every autumn, we get enough rain to take care of that and leave us in comfortable condition, in regards to our water resources. As of 2007, this is no longer the case. We had a much worse summer than usual, with minimal rain. By the end, we were facing one of the worst droughts in a long time - and certainly the worst we've seen in the 13+ years we've lived here. We saw little rain over the fall, and winter hasn't changed that either. The situation? It is not looking so good.

Last fall, the state began passing restrictions on water use and emphasizing that each and every one of us should begin doing what we can to conserve. In following their instructions, my family and I became much more conscious of our water use, taking shorter showers, making sure to never leave water running, and so forth. We successfully lowered our water bill a decent bit. The majority of North Carolinians? They ignored the governor and continued to use water as though we weren't going through anything out of the ordinary. A-hyuck, if this here faucet-thinger still works, there must not be a prob'lem! Gub'mint's just tryin' to screw with us again! (Because yes, we're all backwater hicks. I'm simply an exception from the north, living in their midst and learning their ways. Sort of like a male Jane Goodall. Except stupid enough to rely on bad southern stereotypes for this routine when redneck jokes have never been funny.)

The wealthy, as mentioned in the past, continue to see watering their precious immaculate green lawns (Covered with lots of all-important pesticides to ensure that everyone knows how superior they are by the quantity of dead squirrels around their property.) as a guaranteed right, rather than the superficial bullshit it is. They haven't helped the water issue at all. And with few taking the situation seriously, we've had to curb our water usage even more.

As you can imagine, this includes some fairly unsavory sacrifices. Like no longer flushing the toilet as often. That's not exactly a pleasant sacrifice to make. We're also going to be placing one-liter plastic bottles in the back compartments of all our toilets to reduce water usage when flushing by close to that one liter, at least, which should help a smidgen. And in using the dishwasher even less, we've switched to using paper plates more often so we can simply toss them, while doing what dishes we need to in the sink. All inconvenient, but ultimately decent ways to reduce water use.

The question, however, still remains - will North Carolinians wake up to what we're dealing with before it's too late? At the rate things are going, we're going to end up in a state of emergency by early-mid summer unless people start conserving water more and we get some real rain in the coming months. Will it take losing our drinking water and the ability to practice regular, proper hygiene for people to open their eyes? I sure as hell hope not. Proper hydration, cleanliness, and clean teeth are not things I'd like to see become rare privileges. And I sure as hell don't see this administration doing much if and when we end up in a state of emergency here. They've sat on their hands and claimed they were helping while doing little when worse has occurred, after all, Hurricane Katrina in particular coming to mind, while the right likes to blindly sit back and say that New Orleans has made a full recovery, when in reality, no matter how you look at it, it hasn't. And at the rate things are going, it'll never be the same city it once was again.

This whole situation makes me hope all the more that I manage to make it into one of the grad schools I'm applying to - for either this August or next January - the sooner I can get up north and into an area where water is more plentiful again, the better.

With that thoroughly rambled about, onward to part two! Hye tagged me with this "Rules of Four" meme, so in the interest of helping you to Get to Know Your Blogger better, in pretending you're actually interested, here's my responses:

4 Jobs I have had:
Technically, I haven't had an actual paying job yet - and yes, I do realize how sad that is when I'm turning 24 in a couple of months. Granted, I am a "Blogger," with these eccentric ramblings of mine, or whatever they're worth, and I do have a minimum of advertising I'm not expecting to ever really make any money on in the end, but still, blogging is something, experience-wise. I also work as a reviewer over at Anime Dream, a geeky Japanese animation news and review site I've been a part of since summer 2002, though I haven't done much work there in a while. We take things at our own pace though, and I've got more stuff coming in the pipeline there yet. I also spent 7 months last year working as a Teaching Assistant at the North Carolina State University Japan Center, pretty much from as soon as I got home from my final semester of courses at Charlotte in May until a couple of weeks before Xmas. It wasn't for pay, but to fulfill some international experience requirements for graduation, and it was a worthwhile experience, meeting a lot of interesting people and getting to assist in low level Japanese language instruction. That's three, anyway. I don't have anything I can really put down as a 4th yet, but if I'm lucky, I'll be a published novelist by the end of 2008, so that should hopefully take care of that.

4 Movies I watched over and over:
There's a number of movies that qualify for this. The most frequent four though are definitely Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Last Life in the Universe. All wonderful movies, all highly recommended.

4 Shows I watch:
I watch a lot of shows, so these are tough picks. Going with two of my favorites in primetime, I'd have to say Pushing Daisies and Chuck. (Though The Office is way up there too.) And going with two of the three shows I watch nearly daily, The Daily Show and Colbert Report. (Though I watch Late Night with Conan O'Brien all the time too. The fake feud the three hosts orchestrated a little while back as an opportunity to kill time on all three of their shows before the strike ended last week was pretty hilarious.)

4 Places I have been:
I haven't been outside of the USA yet, so nowhere foreign, but I've been all over the east coast. I went to New York City on a 6th grade string orchestra trip back in the mid-'90s, and have wanted to return ever since. I was born in Baltimore, Maryland - though we left shortly afterwards - and back in summer 2002, after graduating from high school, I went on a weekend "returning to roots" trip of sorts up there with my father, and really enjoyed that city too. Definitely far more my kind of place than the south. Because I've had a lot of family down there, we used to go to Tampa, Florida every summer when I was a kid, so I've spent a good time in that part of the country. Florida's nice, but way too hot for my tastes. Fun to visit, but I couldn't live there. And that pretty much does it for vacation places, but I did spend the first decade of my life growing up in Cincinnati, Ohio, and I still consider that to be my hometown, despite having lived in the south longer - this just isn't my place. (And if that doesn't count, I also went to Indianapolis, Indiana for an aunt's wedding when I was pretty young, though I don't remember much about it.)

4 People who email me:
I don't tend to get much in the way of personal email, but I occasionally get pictures and such in the mail from friends, particularly a good friend who's abroad, working in China now, after he was in Japan for a year not too long ago. He always has amusing stuff to share. Then I get messages from Facebook and livejournal on there, just for various notifications of things. And I get email from a few mailing lists I'm on - Robert Wexler's mailing list in working to check the Bush administration's power, Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac daily poetry and history mailing list, and the Human Rights Campaign mailing list, being a member of that as well.

4 Favorite Things to Eat:
This is a tough one. I love lots of different kinds of food, so picking a few favorites isn't easy. To take a stab at it, though, I love nikujaga - it's a wonderful Japanese stew of sorts that's hard to stop eating. I'm also quite fond of good, fresh sashimi - I love sushi in general, but biting into some well-prepared fresh raw tuna or salmon is pretty incredible. I'm also quite fond of Japanese gyoza dumplings (As well as Chinese shumai dumplings.), though I usually only have the frozen kind. And to throw something more western in there, I love cheese ravioli with a good tomato sauce - Italian sausage in it is always a nice plus, too.

4 Places I would rather be:
I haven't traveled enough to easily throw a list like this together. I'd love to see Japan and what I can of Asia in general, though. Same goes for Europe and Canada. And visiting South America - especially Brazil - would no doubt be a fantastic experience. Though at this point, my main geographical focus in my life right now is more in the New England area.

4 Things I look forward to this year:
Hopefully watching the Republicans suffer a crushing defeat in the November election so we can get a serious start on repairing the decades' worth of damage the Bush administration has done to this country and world, for one. I'd also really like to get into a grad school and finally get out of the south. I'm also looking forward to hopefully getting my first novel published, if things actually go well at all after finishing it, though I'm not exactly counting on a response from the woman I'm writing it for this year - not that I'm holding my breath for it to be a positive response I get from her anyway, rejection being what's to be realistically expected. And in and of hoping to get my first book published this year, I'm looking forward to hopefully getting my first paycheck then as well. (And not so much the part where if I do indeed get into grad school, I end up buried up to my neck in debt for the next several years at least.)

Well, that's that. I'm no good at the tagging part of these things, so hey, if you're looking to tell your readers more about yourself, feel free to consider yourself tagged by me and have at it! Hopefully all that random information didn't bore you too much.

Harrowing Notions of Happiness

Hello there again, "blogosphere." Did you miss me? Of course you did. But it's okay - I'm here now. And I already have general ideas for a very few upcoming entries in my head now. So while I'm sure you panicked after reading that last entry and seeing my terrifying writer's block, I'm of sound mind to babble in your general direction once more.

The subject this time? Awesome Hats Across History!

Or it would have been, but sadly, George "Rufus" Carlin hit me with a restraining order after I wouldn't stop bugging him about that time machine phone booth of his. He keeps claiming the Bill & Ted movies weren't documentaries. Who'd have thought he was such a nutjob? Bill & Ted? Not documentaries? Pshh. Yeah, right.

In the meantime, you'll have to settle for something else. You're accustomed to settling for things, right? Yeah, That's what I thought.

As I talked about a bit in the last entry, I've been trying to get the readerbase for this blog to grow naturally, organically, rather than trying to shove my url down every internet-person's gullet. (My blog is not a food!) As such, this thing? It does not get a ton of hits. Though that's not for a lack of trying. All I can do is keep doing this thing where I keep writing unusual things someone might want to read. Then maybe, just maybe, they'd be compelled to read through all of my archives here and stick around. That's called salesmanship. (Note: No, it is not.) Anyway, getting to the point, I joined one of those social blogging sites where people pimp their word-filled wares, so to speak, and work hard collectively to convince themselves that blogging is still hip and relevant. (It's all about interpretive dance on Youtube now - get with the times, nerds!) It's hard to find people with similarly odd blogs and all that, but I've apparently made enough of a splash (See: Still effectively almost none at all.) to have been tagged with a meme. (A meme!? Me!? ... No, don't give me any pity laughs there, I know, I earned that look of contempt with that one.) So, without further ado, instead of my usual stuff, I say to you, "Meme me up, Scotty!" (This one makes more sense if you know how meme's pronounced.)

You Are 56% Happy

You're definitely a happy person, even though you have your down moments. You tend to get the most out of life, though there's always some more happiness to be squeezed.

How Happy Are You?

So, that thing. Yeah. Blogthings is pretty popular online. (How 'bout that color theme clashing with this blog, huh?) Never really thought I'd drop one into an entry on here, what with my main focus on my stupid ramblings and literary aspirations. But hey, content is content. (This blog is not jumping the shark! It's just doing something a little different, that's all.)

Anyway, looking at the results and the actual factors they took into account, I have to turn my nose up with a self-important "Harrumph!" (I'm actually a 19th century British gentleman, for those of you who were until now unaware. With a monocle and everything.) Happy is one of the last words I'd use to describe myself. I'm an irate, misanthropic oaf, after all, who's excessively stressed out these days and has been quite displeased with much of the usual goings-ons in life for many months and years now. Future in returning to academics? Unclear and somewhat anxiety-inducing, and will be until I manage to get into a grad school, actually start school, and adapt to a comfortable routine, as I eventually did at my undergrad school. Love? All I'm doing in regards to that is a pretty ridiculous long shot that I certainly can't hold my breath over. That's another important aspect of life I'd hardly call happy. Career? Finishing this book is stressful enough in and of itself, though I'm pouring my heart into it, and even thinking about how hard it'll be to get published within this year is even more stressful. Am I a happy person? No, of course not.

What I am, however, that fits the test's criteria better, is an individual who isn't certainly hopelessly optimistic or naive, but who has learned from their experiences. Like anybody else, I've faced my trials and tribulations and overcome much. Of course, I've fallen flat on my face just as often too, which is simply another part of the human experience - if you haven't suffered painful failure, you're still missing something important. Though it's not so fun suffering it repeatedly. And I wasn't about to lie, as I certainly would have had to, in order to get better, higher results on the test. I'm as flawed as anyone, I have my own baggage to carry, and I have my own hangups that naturally come with experience, particularly of the unpleasant variety. But ultimately, while I don't agree with my results - and hell, what good are internet tests and memes beyond giving us a little extra blogging fodder anyway? - I don't feel bad about it, either. I may not be happy, but frankly, what's wrong with being unhappy? Most people are unhappy. Very few really ever know what true happiness is, or experience even a hint of it. We exist in more neutral, subtle shades of gray. At least I'm making an effort at pursuing my dreams, as ridiculous as my writing aspirations surely are, and still taking a chance in hopelessly pursuing someone I love, even if odds are damned good, I'd say, that we'd never end up together, and I'll never know true happiness myself - though spending time with her was the closest I've gotten. Even if I end up destined for complete failure in everything important to me, it's important to at least make the attempt - the statements, the gestures, the effort. It's better than just giving up entirely, like so many do.

And in the end, what is happiness, anyway? How easily can we define it? Is it not something more specifically tailored to the individual, as opposed to a mere universal ideal that no one can agree completely upon? More shades of gray. More complex equations. Life and the human emotions that come with it are complicated matters. Far more so than a cheesy, cute little blog quiz like this even attempts to adequately approach.

At the rate I'm going, I'm risking this thing turning into a philosophy dissertation.

There was another part to the meme, I think - a love/hate thing. But I'm not sure if I was supposed to do that too, haha. I'll pass for now, I think, having rambled your eyes off enough. Hopefully this was satisfactory enough for all interested parties, anyway. This meme thing isn't an every day sort of thing for me, after all. And I don't know enough people out here in this blogging world to really pass it on to anybody in particular. So hey, if you feel like taking the quiz and rambling about happiness yourself, knock yourself out.