Online Dating Dismals

I reactivated my profile on an online dating site yesterday afternoon. There’s already several men that want to meet me, and most of them seem decent enough from their profiles. But something about the whole process depresses me. One guy I clicked on sounded interesting until I reached the part about how he doesn’t date women bigger than a size 6. 6! No matter how skinny I am, I can’t fit into a size 6; I’m tall and I have womanly hips. At best I can do a size 10.

I think that was the point where any vague pleasure I might have been feeling in the process completely dissipated. I get that we are judged by our looks, and in fact I’d like to get someone to do some really good photos of me, to capture the person I see in the mirror. But size 6? I can’t meet standards that are literally impossible, though I am quite willing to lose weight (and have already begun, courtesy of eating Primally).

I’m already loathing the process, and I’ve barely started. It was so much more fun to have my unsuitable crush and to know I wanted to be physically intimate with him on a number of levels. With online dating, you kind of have to make that call before you even meet the person, which strikes me as rather cart before horse-ish. I doubt I would have chosen my unsuitable crush to yearn after if I had only seen his online profile. They are uninspiring.

However, I am going to a Meetup tonight, for fans of Joss Whedon’s Firefly and Serenity. I am tired and grumpy and feeling very non-size-6-ish, but hey, we’re going to order food and watch season 1 of Game of Thrones. If I can’t survive an evening of eating food and watching tv, there’s no hope for me! At least I will meet some new potential friends, and perhaps someone who could be something more. I am planning to go to a range of other Meetups as well, to see if a more organic approach to meeting men will serve me any better. Some of the Meetups are related to sustainability, so a man I meet there may well share some of my more important interests.

Ack, I’m going to be late if I don’t hit the shower! Long day ahead…wish me luck….

 

The Ultimate Question

My conversation with my friend yesterday made me think again about the possibility of living a sustainable life here in Canada. We chatted about Kamsack, SK, which from one point of view has everything the budding bioneer could want – cheap land and housing, government support through tax breaks if you open a business, and lots of fresh clean water available.

The thing is, every time I think about living inland in snow country, I shrivel up. I might, as my friend suggested, enjoy the east coast, which can have harsh winters but is at least coastal, and has cheap land as well. I’ve been to Halifax several times as a child, but never as an adult, and it was all right, but I think I’d prefer PEI if I made a move to the east coast. Prettier, greener, more picturesque (in my memory of at least 35 years ago).

It’s just that…unless I love the land itself, I won’t be happy there. It’s not just cheap land, or fertile soil, or lots of water that I require. There is nothing to nourish my soul in Alberta, for instance. I used to get desperate, living there, to find a place where it was lush and I could soak up the energy I needed, but I would drive for hours, searching, and find nothing. Places like Canmore were better, at least in summer, but the long winters would kill me.

England feels like home, to me. Vancouver doesn’t feel like home but the rainforest does feed my soul, my life energy. But land on the west coast is very expensive, as my friend pointed out. Can I ever be happy and rooted in Canada? Would PEI work, or would I move there and discover that I was dying from lack of some essential spiritual nourishment from the land again?

This seems to be the question I must answer for myself, the one where I get hung up over and over again. I will never stop being nomadic as long as I am not living somewhere that feels like home. How do I find home, and how do I get to live there forever? Because I am still ready to pack up and go…if only I had somewhere to land.

Happiness and Joy

I planned to do many constructive though boring things this weekend. Instead I slept, and read, and made my not-famous but very tasty three-cheese meatloaf, and enjoyed the high from my fizzing hormones, and wrote poetry, and journalled.

This afternoon I also called an old friend who lives in Ontario. Many years ago he mentioned his desire to live off the grid to me, and I thought perhaps he was being a bit too eco - the notion that the grid may one day no longer exist hadn’t really even crossed my mind. But today we had a great talk about sustainability, and places to buy cheap land, and eco-villages, and so on. It made me happy to talk to someone who completely understands and shares my perspective.

…I’ve been sitting staring at my monitor, and typing things and deleting them again, for several minutes now. I was going to write something more about being happy, but I have just realized that what I am feeling is not just happiness, but joy. He does that to me, though there is no romance between us and hasn’t been for, let me see, 19 years. Joy is elusive, seems to me – we can work on being happy, but that soaring feeling of joy is quite another matter, fragile and beautiful.

Thank you for this joy, old friend. I’m sending love your way.

The Ripest of Red Roses

I have a crush on someone completely unsuitable. The part that makes it fun is that I suspect it may be mutual.

But you know – that’s the whole story, from the perspective of writing the tale of our romantic and/or sexual involvement. As long as I follow the rules, there will never be more. As long as I have no courage, there will never be more.

And maybe that’s how it should be. Maybe this delicious frisson of desire is sufficient. At least it shows that I am waking up from a long, dazed sleep.

What does this have to do with sustainability, you may ask? Everything, of course. Without love and sex, what is the point of saving the world?

The Miracle of Growth

Proof that ANYONE can grow garlic, even me!

Lately, as part of trying to eat Primally, I have been buying a lot more fresh fruit and vegetables. I’ve cooked eggplant for the first time in my life, and cabbage as well (though the cabbage had unexpected digestive consequences – why does no one tell me these things?!). On the whole, the experiment is going well, but I have never cooked so much in my life. It’s rather disconcerting. I’m sorry, who am I again? Wasn’t I the woman who loved the quote about how putting the butter on the toast is cooking? I am still not a big fan, but I have gotten considerably more creative, at least, particularly while trying to use up fresh vegetables.

I have also managed to keep alive the parsley and basil plants I bought during the holidays. They are not quite the enormous green shrubs I had hoped they would start becoming, but both are alive and have grown despite a few dead stalks. I haven’t cooked with either of them yet, mind you – afraid that they would keel over if I removed a few leaves! The first basil plant did die, unfortunately, presumably because it was too far gone already. I kept the pot.

I noticed one day that the fresh ginger root I had on my countertop had begun to sprout, so I put it in a bowl and added it to my little collection of plants in front of my patio doors (still too cold to put them outside). I didn’t do anything else with it, but the sprouts have continued to grow. I have no idea how one grows ginger, nor how to harvest it either, but heck, if I can grow my own, why not? I still remember my grandmother in England nipping out to the garden in her house slippers to dig up some horseradish for dinner. Ginger can’t be much different…I hope.

I also have a potato on my counter that has begun to sprout. I am debating whether or not I want to buy a big tub and enough soil to grow it in. Potatoes aren’t really Primal, but I find them appealing in terms of gardening. What the heck, someone will want nice fresh potatoes in the fall, right? Isn’t that what bartering is about? I can pick off potato bugs. If I buy some gloves. Sure I can. Really.

I was reading a splendid book I got out of the library, called Gardening for the Faint of Heart, by Robin Wheeler, when I came across her description of how to grow garlic. Hey! I had garlic on my countertop, and an empty pot with dirt in it, courtesy of my deceased basil plant. Maybe the garlic had been sprayed in the store to discourage growth, maybe not. But I took three cloves and planted them in the pot. I put the dead basil stalks on top for compost/hay of a sort, to hold the water in, and then watered it.

I grew a splendid crop of fuzzy gray mould. So much for my “compost”.

I wasn’t sure if the garlic would grow, but saw no signs of it on the day I saw the mould, so shrugged and left the pot alone, not expecting anything. If the garlic had been sprayed, I might need to toss the whole pot, because I didn’t want to use soil that was contaminated with non-growth chemicals. But I wanted to be sure there was no hope.

Then one day, I came home from work, and all three cloves had sprouted, most emphatically. I think one stalk had grown an inch and a half, seemingly in a day. I have not ceased to marvel since at their ability to shoot up (hence the name “shoots”, I suppose). I mean, just look at those! (I was going to put the picture down here, for my big reveal, but WordPress refuses to let me move photos. Harumph.) Their daily growth is spectacular to someone like me who has never gardened before, and I finally understand why people talk about the miracle of plant growth.

Somehow this all seems like a much bigger revelation to me than I had expected. I am somewhat humbled by it. Of course I knew that plants grew, in an intellectual kind of way, but in my younger adult days I refused to have house plants because I didn’t want to take care of them. My mother taught me to hate both gardening and plant care when I was a child…though I concede that that wasn’t her intent. But both tasks were just more chores I had to perform alone, without help or encouragement or innate reward.

I have always felt a sneaking guilt about the houseplant a friend gave me that I killed through enormous and fairly deliberate neglect, though it hung on for months. But I was extremely irritated by her insistence that every home needs plants, and I still think it’s unfair to give someone a gift of anything living, unasked-for, and insist that they keep it alive. I’m sorry for the plant, though. It deserved better than me.

So finding myself keeping plants alive and helping them grow is rather like finding myself cooking (another chore I was taught to hate). But it does ease the question in my mind, as to whether or not a non-gardener can learn to love gardening and ultimately live a sustainable life. I’m a long way from putting in my own permaculture crops, but the truth is that plants want to grow. I just need to help them along. And yes, there really can be innate rewards in gardening – like seeing my garlic cloves shoot up so spectacularly.

Maybe there has been a miracle of growth taking place inside me, as well.

Making Money

It has been a difficult week at work, for a variety of reasons which I won’t discuss here as they are nearly all internal matters. My one comfort is that my job seems more secure, as they are appointing an interim replacement for my departing boss. I note with pleasure that the person who has been chosen is someone with whom I believe it will be an absolute joy to work.

Still, as I continue to read and ponder Your Money or Your Life, I wonder what my life would look like if I could resolve my money worries. My current job is congruent with my beliefs in that it significantly helps me to do my research (love that university library card!), but it is true that its primary purpose is to be a source of money for me…and I am not being paid my market value. Then again, that library access is literally invaluable.

But see, even there I fall into the industrial economy trap of thinking my job must also be my source of fulfillment. I could buy academic library access under other circumstances. Or I could become a graduate student (oh, how I wish I could) and have full run of the library that way. Or I could (stretching a point) become a famous expert on sustainability and be offered a faculty position at Oxford. An Anglophile academically-minded person like me gets weak at the knees when contemplating having the run of the Bodleian.

This blog arose out of my desire to emigrate to England. I did set up another blog called Life After Oil, but I seem to be putting everything here. And the more I research sustainability, the more that makes sense to me. I am not an ecological saint and I don’t expect anyone else to be. I want to lure people to sustainability with the carrot of a better life, not the stick of eminent catastrophe – though they need to know the stick is there to understand why I am offering them the carrot! The point is, however I live my life, I want to live it in England. That is my heart’s desire.

The more you read about finding happiness, the more you discover that it is not dependent on conspicuous consumption, and that past a certain point, material goods can start to seem burdensome with their upkeep and protection. The brief buzz of purchase has a long tail of maintenance. I think most people could be led towards sustainability if they saw that it involves a way off the consumerist treadmill. Our material needs are minor compared to our material wants, but our wants can be shifted back to meeting other needs, like those of human companionship. I don’t want to live in England to be rich or glamourous or whatever; I want to live there to be immersed in my heritage, and to be near my extended family, and because England delights all five of my senses.

Instead of making money, why can’t I “make” bountiful harvests, and wool and honey and candles, and a community of friends and neighbours? I can never find security through money, because money can be taken away. Of course nothing is ever 100% secure, but I think a life based on needing money is less secure than most. Basing your happiness on money therefore isn’t a good strategy either.

…I’ve been sitting here for several minutes, trying to decide what insight I am leading myself towards. I don’t think it’s anything new, but perhaps it is a firmer resolve to get myself free of the money trap and find my way to England on a permanent basis. At this point I always wish I could find a magical shortcut! But I’m not even sure I can accomplish both those goals via non-magical longcut.

Still, I do believe I am on the right track, that I am accumulating the knowledge and insights I need so that eventually I will go “over threshold” and everything will come together in a way that will indeed seem like a magical shortcut. But for now, I must go shower and return to the world of making money….

Nibbling At Change

Lately the conflict between vegans and omnivores has been cropping up in my life. I have a couple of vegan friends, and though I couldn’t live on a vegan diet I’m not going to try to argue someone out of veganism. I do, however, get grumpy when vegans start trying to argue me out of eating meat! I am not in favour of CAFOs but eating meat is natural for us. What we need is better ways to raise and slaughter animals, not to eliminate meat from the diet of all. Besides, in a well-run farm (for instance), no part of the bird or animal goes to waste, even if some parts can only be used for fertilizer or compost.

I admit I did think that veganism was a self-indulgent way of eating. I understood that vegans were typically guided by ethical principles, but their proteins tended to be provided by the industrial economy, meaning trucked in from faraway locations. Nuts, for instance. Vancouver does have oak trees and probably chestnut trees (I know Victoria has chestnuts, though I don’t know if they’re the edible kind), but I don’t see acorns and chestnuts offered for sale. And soy, well, unfermented soy is bad for you even before you factor in the fact that most soy is now from GMO crops. Gluten is also problematic for many. So veganism (I thought) was not sustainable in any practical sense.

Then a vegan friend of mine pointed out yesterday that broccoli and spinach have protein in them too. Hm. I did a little digging on the web, and what seems to be the bottom line is that a complete protein has 22 amino acids. Plants do not offer all 22 amino acids, but our bodies (in theory) can convert the ones they do offer into the ones we can only obtain from meat, fish, etc. I think this must be the root of why some people can live as vegans and some can’t – not everyone can convert the plant amino acids into the remainder of the 22 we need for health. Nobody ever told our bodies that we had to stop eating meat. Or, as someone else put it (I think it was Tasha of Voraciouseats.com, who wrote the extremely moving and thoughtful post “A Vegan No More“), ethics don’t trump biology.

So I am going to call it a draw. People whose bodies can live on a vegan diet can probably do so sustainably if they try, but people that can’t bear to give up eating meat may well have sound biological reasons on their side. CAFOs are just one more symptom of our industrial economy sickness, when all is said and done. A diet containing meat can be sustainable too.

I have definitely noticed that my ways of eating are changing since I began the Primal Blueprint diet. My mood is better – less depression, less anxiety, and more self-confidence – and I am less prone to eating everything in sight when I am hungry. I do still struggle to make sure I have leftovers each night for breakfast and lunch the following day, but that is just learning how to manage my kitchen. But I am also trying new foods and paying more attention to how I cook what I eat, probably as a result of having more energy and enjoying my food more. That’s very new for me.

I also have looked into preserving foods the old-fashioned way, through canning (though calling it “jarring” would make more sense!). I’d like to try it sometime, but I would need all the tools, none of which I have. Also, my Fanny Farmer cookbook offers lots of recipes for things I don’t eat because of their ingredients (sugar, or peppers, or onions…), but also cautions not to go tinkering with recipes because certain conditions are required to prevent mould, bacteria, etc., depending on the acidity of the food and heck knows what all else. I will need to rummage for other cookbooks on the topic.

The other theme that has cropped up in my life a few times of late is that change is best managed in small increments. That makes me feel better about the way I have been nibbling away at making small changes over time! Buying Pyrex dishes to replace my Ziplok bags for lunches, for example. Sometimes I still use Ziploks, depending, but I expect it is more important to persevere than to expect perfection.

I am really wondering how I would live if I were not dependent on a job for money, though. Your Money or Your Life is proving to be a very good read – but can it really lift me out of debt and let me go hostelling around Europe? The book does point out that travelling may simply indicate a need for change and that you can substitute far-off travel for local travel, but I am not yet convinced. Still…do I really need table linens – or a table? Would I trade them away if I could go vagabonding?