From James Brady to hermit crabs

I have never wanted to be a celebrity.  I suspect this places me in the minority.  But being a celebrity just seems awful.  You can't go to the grocery store without somebody inspecting your cart or disparaging your panty line.  I first realized this when I was a little girl, and somehow had ended up working at a parade in Washington DC.  I'm not sure why it seemed like a good idea to have little girls volunteering to seat members of the public.  Like we had any clue what was going on, and would be able to tell anyone else?  Or would have any authority when said members of the public didn't want to sit where we told them to sit?

That wasn't my point, actually, that was a tangent.

Anyway, it rained at the parade.  We all got thoroughly soaked.  And somebody saw us all bedraggled and sad and cold and decided to invite us into the VIP tent to warm up.  There weren't any VIPs in it, yet.  And Red Cross or some other helpful organization had blankets, so they wrapped us up and we were quite a bit less miserable.  And then James Brady rolled into the tent. 

James Brady had been shot, of course.  I mean, not right then.  Before the parade.  WELL before the parade.  He was in a wheelchair.  And the press followed him in.  He looked harassed.  They were asking him pointless questions, just to make him stumble over words, as they knew he would.  And he slurred out something for them.  To make them go away, I assume, because he didn't look like he enjoyed being on national television with his wheelchair and his brain injury.

Note that since I was standing behind him, this was my one flirtation with national tv.  Wet rat wearing a wool blanket.  No idea why nobody has called my agent yet.

So that was my early experience with celebrity.  Perhaps if my early experience had involved some sort of pampering and adulation rather than sodden misery and embarrassment for the disabled guy sitting next to me, I would think it was fantastic.  But it didn't.  And although intellectually I understand that some people want everybody to look at them, I have a very hard time understanding it emotionally.

Now, I wouldn't mind being somebody so awesome that people thought I should be a celebrity.  On account of my new era moon landing, perhaps.  Or my humanitarian efforts, which had ended world hunger, overpopulation, and religious differences.  But I wouldn't want to actually BE a celebrity.  I value anonymity.  At least in a large community context.  I don't mind being in a small community and having everybody know me, and knowing everybody.  I like knowing that people know exactly who I am, that what you see is what you get.  This is me.  I don't put on airs, I don't suffer fools gladly, and I try to be nice to my fellow man.  Also I don't wear makeup, and that right there means I'll never be on anybody's tv screen.

The idea of my anonymity so engrained in me that I am constantly surprised that people remember me.  "Yes, Amy, I've known you for fifteen years."  Oh.. gosh.. I didn't think you had noticed me.

I realize that having people remember you after you've been around for fifteen years is completely unlike being a celebrity.  But in my mind somehow they're connected.  Maybe I would make a good hermit.  I mean, I'm crabby sometimes..

This shall not stand. Probably.

Do you think the world has too many people?  I mean, we have a *lot* of people.  Many of them live in desperate poverty.  Many don't have access to clean water, or even clean air!  Too much pollution from too much industry, too many cooking fires, just too much everything.

I don't want to die soon, of course, but I think a big old round of plague would solve a few problems.

The same problem we have here (a few immensely wealthy people, and then everybody else) applies on a larger scale around the world. A few immensely wealthy countries, and then everybody else.  And the trickle down effect never does seem to trickle all the way down to the bottom.

You'd think at some point, something would have to give.  I guess it has, in places.  The USSR took a shot at leveling the playing field.  I'm not sure how well that worked out.  I mean, I know millions died.  But I'm not sure if the daily life of the peasant was better or worse afterward.  Probably the daily life of the rich guys that didn't get killed was about the same.

I think the US is effectively a giant theme park, compared to much of the rest of the world.  There's huge excess.  It's all shiny and it keeps getting upgraded.  It's not based on anything real.  We don't make that many products anymore, I mean.  "Finance" is a very large chunk of our economy.  Not something you can smell, or taste, or feel.  We effectively pay our best and brightest to make wagers on what might or might not happen.  Weird.

By an accident of birth I live in a house probably 30 times the size of the shack that I might have lived in elsewhere on the planet.  (The yard, however, would need to be a lot larger if I were doing subsistence farming.)  And this house isn't big by US terms!  It's ludicrous when you consider it.  I very much doubt that I work harder or am more deserving than people all over the country, and yet here I sit in the American middle class.

It all seems unworkable, and yet it keeps working.  Perhaps that's why we have such a huge (and expensive) military - to keep all the other guys from trying to make us share our wealth.

Ludicrous.  Not the military (well, maybe the military), but the disparity in the lives of people all over.

All those immigrants who came here and struggled and sweated and endured racism and classism, so their children could have a chance at a better life?  Totally made the right call.  Maybe not those coming here today, because I don't think it's as easy now as it was a hundred years ago.  Our lower classes seem to be staying low.  But those guys in the first couple of hundred years vastly changed the lives of their descendants.

I wonder what will happen in the lives of ours.

No yoga = bad

I headed out to my chiropractor's office this morning.  She was concerned that I wasn't healing very quickly.  She mentioned sending me out for xrays.  :(  Do not want!  I told her it felt like something was pulling me out of position after I got adjusted, and she started poking around at the not-hurty side.  Turns out, my left quadricep is really tight.  It probably wouldn't BE tight if I had been going to yoga, but I wasn't going because I was hurt and wanted to let the ligaments heal.

So, now I have a quadricep stretch to do.  And yoga starts back up next week.  We're between sessions right now.

It is becoming more and more obvious that I really can't live without yoga. Whether I want to or not.

I had a thought this morning and looked up sign language.  DeLee and I talked about it while hiking a couple of weeks ago.  She thought sign language was a direct translation of spoken language, and I thought it had its own grammar.  But neither of us really had current knowledge so we kind of left it hanging there, undefinitively addressed.  According to Wikipedia, (Wikipedia knows all ), there are a BUNCH of sign languages, and generally no direct correspondence to the local language.  There is a geographic correspondence - people in one area tend to all use the same dialect.  But the grammar isn't necessarily similar to the grammar of the local language.  Although, there are such things as Signed English, and that is a reasonably close representation.  I think.

Interesting stuff, to me anyway. The article also addresses areas in which everybody knows and uses sign, because the deaf population is large.  Martha's Vineyard, for instance.  And situations in which you have to know at least some rudimentary sign language, such as in the military for combat situations, in baseball, or when there are taboos against speech.  The article mentioned Australian Aboriginal  sign language which is used during times when speech is taboo, but I wondered also about folks who had taken vows of silence for religious reasons.  Does the silence extend to all communication, or just oral communication?

These are the sorts of things I ponder.

I have been listening to an audiobook recently.  It's apocalyptic fiction.  I'm glad I'm listening to it now, not while I'm on the trail fifty miles from anywhere.  In the book, the main character is starting to miss some of the advantages of civilization, primarily electricity for food preservation.  And that's important, but I think what I would (and do, while I'm hiking) miss most is the vast repository of knowledge readily available to me online.  That, and the easy communication afforded by the internet, cell, and phone networks.  I could probably grow and store food, but if we lost the networks I would probably never hear from most of my family again.  Or most of my far-flung friends.

Hey, friends.  Love you!  I'll miss you if the world ends!  Just wanted you to know.

How bad weather might affect the future of the AT

That was some storm, wasn't it?  Hundreds dead, brick buildings demolished down to the ground, trees snapped like so many toothpicks?  Some of the photos I've seen looked remarkably like the damage done by tsunamis.  I guess catastrophic is catastrophic no matter where you are. 

I have friends and loved ones way too close to the path of devastation.  I might get to see some of it, too.  In a week I'm driving down to southern Virginia to hike for a week, and I'll be going right by some of the damaged areas.  Of course with the way tornados skip around I could walk half a mile from the track and not know it.

It got me to thinking.  I've been assuming that the violent weather is part of the global warming trend.  The models predict more violent and extreme weather.  If that's the case, life is about to get very interesting (and scary) in a lot of places.  We should find out in a year or two if this year is a fluke or part of a trend.  If it's a trend, some of things I love to do best, which involve being outdoors, are not going to be so easy or fun to pursue. 

One thing I'm talking about, of course, is hiking the Appalachian Trail.  (Though the horseback riding will also be problematic.  I can probably get around that by moving the horse to somewhere with an indoor arena, if tornadoes don't take out all the arenas..) If we get more wet and wild weather, there are several consequences that will make thruhikes much more difficult.

1) 2000 miles of slippery rocks, roots, and mud.  Slips and falls, already a problem in intermittent wet weather, will become even more of a problem in constant wet weather.  I shudder to think about trying to hike some sections in the rain.
2) With more rain comes more vegetation.  It will be hard for the volunteer maintainers to keep the footpath open, even with hundreds or thousands of feet helping kill off anything growing in the middle of the path.
3) Rain is hard on hikers in so many ways.  Your feet shred, you get hypothermia more easily, everything gets heavier as it gets damper, paper and electronics are damaged, food doesn't keep as well, and spirits wither.  Plus, no views.
4) More uprooted trees means more obstructions to the path.  There are so few maintenance volunteers compared to the mileage that has to be maintained that it can take a long time to get big trees off the path in a regular year where there aren't many blowdowns.  It seems obvious that more blowdowns caused by worse weather means it will take even longer.  Regularly bad weather means trees and branches falling all the time, not just during winter.  Shelters will likely take on more damage too.  Most of them are near trees.
5) Wet ickiness aside, the chances of being killed by violent weather (tornadoes and lightning mostly, but also drowning at fords) will go up.

If these things should come to pass, it will take a different, more determined breed of hiker to thruhike the Appalachian Trail.  The safe hiking season might become shorter or even nonexistent in places with mud problems.  They already ask you not to hike in parts of New England during mud season.  If mud season is all year round, then what?

While I hope this year is an aberration (there have been rainy years before, and there will be again), it fits too well with the predictions for me to be comfortable thinking that.  Every time I consider the future and try to project what things might look like in 20 to 50 years, I scare myself.